Plain English MOT

We all need a brush up on our plain English skills from time to time. This page is for those who want to put their writing skills through a quick MOT.

How to check if you’re writing English effectively:

• use our top tips for effective English 
• get another opinion
• try some readability tests

Top tips for effective English

Download and print out this PDF. Keep it handy to remind you of the simple things you can do to improve your writing:

Top tips for effective English (PDF, 2 pages, 35KB) 

Get another opinion

The best measure of successful English is whether or not your intended audience understands it.  One way of testing this is by adding ‘readability’ questions to questionnaires that you send out. For example, in a leaflet asking for feedback on plans to develop a local park, you could include the line ‘was this document easy to read?’ or ‘did you find the document easy to understand?’

When writing for the web, you could ask your web experts whether they can add a tick box to your page for people to check if they found the article easy to read.

For an interesting case study on how one coucil developed a resident group to feed back on the language in their publications, see Derby's Plain Talking Group. 

Try some readability tests

The Gunning fog index
This gives the number of years of education that the reader needs to understand the document. The test works on the basis that shorter sentences written effectively achieve a better score than long sentences written in complicated language.

Find out how to calculate the Gunning fog index of your writing.

The Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores
These provide another measure to assess the reading ease and grade of your writing.
You can use Microsoft Word to automatically calculate your document’s Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores:

• Open your document in Microsoft Word
• Go to Tools > Options
• Under Spelling and Grammar, tick 'Show readability statistics'
• Click Okay
• Go to Tools > Spelling and Grammar
• Tick the 'Check grammar' box
• Check the spelling and grammar of your document
• When you have finished, your readability statistics will show automatically

Find out more about Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores.

The Standard Measurement of Gobbledegook / the 'SMOG Ready Reckoner'

• Select text to be assessed for its readability level.
• Count 10 sentences.
• Count number of words which have three or more syllables. 
• Multiply this number by 3 
• Find the number closest to your answer: 1       4       9       16       25       36       49       64       81       100       121       144       169
• Find the square root of this number: 1       2       3       4       5       6       7       8       9       10       11       12       13 
• Add 8 to this number
• You now have your readability score

The lower the readability level, the easier something is to read and understand. A readability level under about 10 will be able to be understood by most people.