Readability/Usability/Quality 2-00 (June 2000) by Åke Rullgård

The Paperless Society, Where Did You Go?

Despite the fantastic development of computers and software, the paperless society seems to be far from implementation. On the contrary, the consumption of paper for documents has increased over the recent years. How come?

One reason seems to be that most people prefer reading documents from paper, and so print most documents that have been produced and stored electronically before they read them. Why?

One explanation is that we are used to reading from paper. To break this habit we need to find a way to make reading from screen more attractive. More attention should be paid to Readability! True, modern word processors offer good possibilities for improvement without much effort on our part. My idea is that writers should, as a sign of respect for their readers, make every effort in preparing their texts so they have good readability on screen.

 

How to Proceed

Here are some suggestions on how to facilitate reading from the screen. These suggestions, except for number 6, also apply to paper documents.

1. Stop using hyphens for breaking words at the end of a line! Using hyphens for this purpose is an anachronism from the old days, when the writing techniques needed a means for handling a word that had already been partly typed but could not be finished before the end of the line. For users of word processors this is no problem, because the word will be moved to the next line unbroken. Unbroken words are easier to comprehend.
   Using hyphens also encouraged writers to make the right edge of the text straight, which we recognize today as a completely unnecessary and even harmful principle. Scientific investigations have shown that the reading speed for text with a straight right edge, obtained by means of software for so called computer-fill-out, is reduced by 10-15 % as compared to the same text with random shape of the right edge.
   Use text without syllabifications, which is rather common nowadays. TC-FORUM is almost free from this filth.
2. Use the so called hard spaces and hard hyphens to ensure that words and other sequences of characters (i.e. article numbers or other codes containing hyphens), are kept unbroken.
   The hard space is also recommended to avoid breaking between the numeric value and the following unit of measurement, i.e. 12 V DC. Keeping all these characters from 1 to C unbroken contributes very much to avoidance of misunderstanding. Also phrases like not more than USD 10 000 000 should be saved from being broken at line ends. A possible break after not will easily make the reader see and remember only the start of next line more than USD 10 000 000 which is quite something else. A possible break between groups of zeroes could also give way to a wrong impression.
   Use of hard spaces avoids all these problems once and for all regardless of any composing at printing.
   The use of hard spaces is also an excellent technique for preventing names of persons and companies from being broken. In this case, the technique will serve the double purpose of facilitating understanding as well as showing politeness; it is considered impolite to split a person’s first, middle and surname at line ends. Even worse would be to allow split of a name by a hyphen!
3. Apply the principle of "chunking, i.e. combining text items into meaningful units of information by breaking the lines according to the content..." as pointed by Sabine Wolf in an article in TC-FORUM 3 August 1997. The quotation above is from said article as well as the applied breaking of lines.
4. Use quotation marks only to cite a sentence, said or written. In the old days, i.e. when word processors were not available, quotation marks were often used to mark also special words or phrases. Nowadays, such marking should be performed by differing style. Doing so also avoids mistakes in instructions like ENTER "1", often occuring in manuals. Does that mean that one should enter the digit 1 or "1"? The alternative is to write ENTER 1 if only the digit is to be entered.
   Today we often see frequent use of quotation marks to indicate that the meaning of the quoted word or phrase is not exactly what it says literally. This use of quotation marks is often a sign of a sloppy author who does not bother finding the exact wording and is an insult to the readers who are left with making their own interpretation, and perhaps misunderstanding, of the weak expression. A page polluted with this type of quotation marks announces sloppy contents.
5. Use readability indices to get an indication of possible improvements in every text produced! There are many methods, intrinsically language dependent, developed for this purpose, although not very much applied by technical writers. I suggest that the use and improvement of such indices should be promoted by INTECOM. The departement on READABILITY/USABILITY/ QUALITY in TC-FORUM is a good arena for presentation of ideas and experience. Analysis by means of a readability index does not, of course, grant good quality of the contents of the text. But it does give the author valuable hints about potential difficulties for the reader, and identifies sentences which might need improvement. An example of a very useful readability analysis method is the KIX-method, developed and applicable for the Swedish language. This method is a development of the so-called LIX index, which is defined as: LIX=(Number of words/Number of sentences)+ 100x(Number of long words/Number of words)
   Long words are words longer than 6 characters. (Applicable for the Swedish language)
   Books, in Swedish, for children should have a LIX of around 20-25. Heavy bureaucratic text shows a LIX of around 80.
   Similar methods are available for other languages. I suggest that it is an important task for INTECOM and TC-FORUM to inform technical communicators about development in this field of communication techniques.
6. Apply hypertext technique to make the basic document short and thereby attractive for reading from the screen. Details, if required, can be retrieved via hyperlinks. This is a possibility available only via the screen. The main text and the hyperlink texts should, however, show good readability, for instance by means suggested in this article.
7. Writers must produce linguistically good products! In the struggle for this goal, analysis of readability index obtained for the text is helpful, (most methods punish long sentences, which are a potential sources of misunderstanding). In technical communication it is further of the utmost importance that the nomenclature complies with standards and is used consistently throughout the entire document.

The ideas above have been critizied because they increase the amount of paper required to print texts. This is, however, irrelevant in the case of on-screen presentation. Good readability is, however, so important that it is worth the price of somewhat more printing space on our way to the paperless society.  

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