Runaway Plain-Language Blockbuster
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Dan Brown's Secret Weapon
OF the millions of words written about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, few have mentioned the effect of its 7th-grade level of readability on its success. A few critics actually condemned its ease-of-reading as a liability rather than the key to its massive audience.
Anyone not aware of The Da Vinci Code has been living under a rock for the last three years. Since the publication of the novel in 2003, the literary world has talked of nothing else. While it started life as just another mystery novel, the book soon moved into history as one of the most successful books of all time and sending Dan Brown into literary superstardom.
Whatever you think about the book, it is hard to escape these measures of success:
- 60.5 million copies sold worldwide, with 5 million paperbacks published.
- Read from cover to cover by one out of five adults in the U.S.
- Read by 24% of Catholics and 15% of Protestants in the U.S.
- Four out of five readers are college graduates with at least $60,000 annual income.
- Spawned dozens of follow-up books and a new European tourist industry.
- Most widely read book of a religious theme after the Bible.
- Opening weekend movie grossed $232 million worldwide, making it second only to the opening of Star Wars: Episode Three, which took in $253 million worldwide.
Language to Shout About
For publishers and writers, it is no secret that simple language is a key ingredient of success. As we pointed out in our May 2005 Newsletter, what writers have in common like Steven King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, and Michael Crichton is that they all write at the 7th-grade level.
Although many ingredients go into a blockbuster such as this, we cannot ignore the snappy prose that carries the reader briskly from one short chapter to the next. If there is a lesson here, it is that plain language is the key to a brilliant writing career.
The Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG)
 McLaughlin: still searching for a better formula. |
Harry McLaughlin's Easy Formula
THE SMOG readability formula has long been one of the most popular formulas, mainly because of its reliability and ease-of-use. A Google search for "SMOG formula" will bring up 554,000 hits.
The formula is the creation of G. Harry McLaughlin, who has spent much of his life in applied psychology.
Harry started his career as a sub-editor of the Mirror newspaper in London, one of the largest and most readable newspapers in the world.
He left the newspaper to pursue a doctorate in psycholinguistics at the University of London. His thesis, "What Makes Prose Understandable," showed why the readability formulas work: the lengths of words and sentences are good predictors of textual difficulty.
After teaching human communications at City University of London, he moved to Toronto, where he taught briefly at York University and then to the University of Syracuse, where he published his SMOG formula in 1969.
Harry worked two years with NASA, helping them develop procedures for staffing Mission Control in Houston. Then he taught at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
The Quest for a Better Formula
What had originally inspired Harry was the desire to improve on the available formulas. Believing that the vocabulary and sentence features of a text interact with one another, his formula multiplied them instead of adding them as other formulas did.
The SMOG formula requires counting the number of words with more than two syllables in 30 sentences (the polysyllable count) and then applying this simple formula:
SMOG grade = 3 + square root of polysyllable count.
Harry validated his formula against the McCall-Crabbs reading tests, using a 100% correct-answer criterion. As a result, his formula generally predicts scores higher than other formulas.
Fortunately for us, Harry's interests have again returned to finding a better formula. While working on that, he has put his current formula on his Web page, where you can paste and test your documents:
http://webpages.charter.net/ghal/SMOG.html
The page also features three of Harry's original articles on readability.
Download It Now—Free! |
Plain Language in the News
Plain-language
labels required for allergens:
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/14533040.htm
Don
Watson profile:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/money/profile-don-watson/2006/05/08/1146940478544.html
Fed
still not speaking plain English:
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/05-06/05-11-06/11business.htm
Push for plain English in Queensland schools:
Confusion
in park-strip planning:
href="http://www.adn.com/opinion/story/7737317p-7649163c.html
Sick of English: http://blogg.aftonbladet.se/1366/perma/11097/
Straight
talk on financial literacy:
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/6969785/c_6970272?f=home_todayinfinance
The
law in plain English:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2214597,00.html
Why
official English must be forever plain:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-2214400,00.html
Drug
ads for cancer patients difficult to read:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=44654
Unparliamentary
language:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5054940.stm