Jan 7, 2008 Posted by Herko on Jan 7, 2008 in Professional notes | 0 comments

Note to gov: don’t make your texts too simple

The Dutch gov­ern­ment aims to keep their texts sim­ple and clear. This as part of its pol­icy to make its con­tents acces­si­ble with­out dis­crim­i­na­tion. In order to achieve this goal, a lot of texts and forms are being reviewed on their com­plex­ity and read­abil­ity, guide­lines are cre­ated on how to write read­able sim­ple texts and a lot of research on text read­abil­ity is being con­ducted. Bureau Taal (The Lan­guage Agency) has writ­ten a very nice book­let on lan­guage read­abil­ity and lev­els of under­stand­ing. Basi­cally, there are 4 lev­els, with 2 sub­levels. A1 being the most sim­ple text, and D2 the most com­plex. Euro­pean Research indi­cated that most gov­ern­ment texts are writ­ten in C1 and C2 level, while only 15% of the pop­u­la­tion fully under­stands those texts.
A recent study ques­tions these lev­els how­ever. Using the pop­u­lar text read­abil­ity mea­sur­ing meth­ods a pop­u­lar children’s book was mea­sured, and the results were sur­pris­ing to say the least: only 15% of adults would be able to fully under­stand the book (for the Dutch peo­ple who read this: the book was Pinkeltje…).
And now more criti­sism comes from an author­i­ta­tive source: in the jan­u­ary edi­tion of the Onze Taal mag­a­zine, by the Genootschap Onze Taal (the orga­ni­za­tion that man­ages the offi­cial Dutch lan­guage so to speak), com­men­ta­tors advice the Dutch Gov­ern­ment not to go over­board on sim­plic­ity in favor of nuance. The rea­son for this crit­i­cism is a recent trans­la­tion of the Dutch Con­sti­tu­tion into sim­ple Dutch, which –accord­ing to the com­men­ta­tors– loses too much of its intended nuance in the trans­la­tion. This prompts them to cau­tion the Dutch gov­ern­ment not to take sim­pli­fy­ing texts too far, and keep a fine bal­ance between read­able by the largest pos­si­ble group and (specif­i­cally legal) clar­ity and completeness.

In my hum­ble opin­ion a huge amount of work is still to be done to make nor­mal texts read­able for nor­mal peo­ple. We all have a ten­dency to write com­pli­cated texts just because it con­veys more pro­fes­sion­al­ism. As if the less peo­ple who get what you mean, the more pro­fes­sional you are is the stan­dard. Writ­ing sim­ple texts isn’t a goal tho, but a means to an end, and we shouldn’t forge that. Com­plex issues can­not be reduced to sim­ple ones just for the sake of com­mu­ni­cat­ing them to the masses. So, I am glad for this sig­nal –even tho I am rather excited about the trans­la­tion of our Con­sti­tu­tion into sim­ple Dutch.

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