The most basic task that the animal advocate must achieve is to be understood.
The message should not be lost in big words, confusing symbols, or disorganized ideas. Animal advocates have a responsibility to make their messages clear.
With that in mind, I copied and pasted text from a handful of vegan fliers into a readability tool. The tool determines the amount of education required to understand the literature. The readability tool calculates the “Flesch Reading Ease.”
A score of 90–100 means the literature can be easily understood by an average 11-year old student, a score between 60–70 can be comprehended by 13- to 15-year old students, and a score of 30 or under means the literature best understood only by college graduates.
Since most of the literature is to be handed out to high school and college students, not college graduates, it makes sense to craft a pamphlet that is easily understood by 13-15 year olds, that is, a pamphlet that has a Flesch Reading Ease score of 60 or higher.
The results of my little experiment? Poor. I won’t name names, but here’s an idea:
- An “abolitionist” flier scored a Flesch Reading Ease of 27.46.
- Another “abolitionist” pamphlet scored 36.36.
- A “what’s wrong with dairy” flier received a score of 39.48.
- An animal emancipation style flier scored a respectable 45.79.
- In contrast, a vegan education booklet scored 61.12.
- And a “vegetarian starter kit” returned a result of 64.23.
In comparison, Reader’s Digest magazine is about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. This one page “abolitionist” flier was more difficult to read and understand than the Harvard Law Review. (source)
Readability is not the “sole criterion” for determining the worth of a leaflet, but it’s a necessary fundamental factor. If a leaflet scores low in readability nothing else about it matters because the leaflet is more likely to be misunderstood and disregarded than a leaflet that is easier to understand.
Why do poorly written leaflets exist? I think this happens because many of the people who write these hand-outs are smart, educated people who are very capable of understanding complex language. Many have studied philosophy or law and are very comfortable writing in an academic style. Although there may be another explanation, I believe they are more concerned with expressing their own ideas and theories than they are concerned with actual, tangible results for animals.
Regardless of anyone’s intentions, we can all learn from this. We should make sure our fliers can be easily understood by most people. By making our message difficult to understand we’re not only failing the animals we’re also excluding a number of people who might very well have become vegan or vegetarian had they received a more readable pamphlet or had they stumbled across a more readable website.
Practically speaking if my message were crafted with college graduate readability, I could only hope to reach less than 20% of my city’s population. Statistics from the 2000 Census show that only 18.2% of Las Vegans have a Bachelor’s degree. So, in order to read my community, I must use a leaflet with a higher readability score.
To improve your writing’s readability here are some tips:
- Use short sentences and small common words.
- Repeat important ideas using different words and phrases.
- Make lists and prioritize key concepts.
- Add appropriate images when possible.
- Ask other people to read your work and help you edit it.
We owe it to the animals to ensure that everyone understands us. If we are not understood, we may as well be mooing, clucking, or oinking.
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Post Script:
- This article has been crossposted at Selling Compassion.
- This post was originally published May 5, 2009. Minor edits have taken place since then.
- Update January 2012: HRC took this idea and ran with it. They did a comprehensive study of outreach literature. The report is online here: http://www.humanespot.org/system/files/Veg_Literature_Readability.pdf (you will need to log in to the website in order to veiw).