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Thinking of the readers Jane Smith describes the BMJ's moves towards readability We want the BMJ to be readable - and even a pleasure to read. Our core readers are doctors, so we assume some shared knowledge and language, but we are also a general medical journal - so we need to be as accessible as possible to all health professionals. About four years ago we had concerns that our style book was getting unwieldy, and we thought it would be useful to go back to first principles. What were we trying to achieve when we edited our accepted papers? Not surprisingly, what emerged was that readability was not the only important thing. We then decided to produce a plan to improve our readability. That meant being able to define and measure it. Tim Albert analysed 10 papers and found that most changes were at word/sentence level rather than structural changes and that the biggest changes were made to the additional items that "market" papers to readers - such as summary points and abstracts. We then decided to focus on non-research articles on the grounds that the main purpose of editing research papers is to make them more accurate, so that they can be critically appraised. Education and Debate articles, in contrast, are meant to tempt in general readers. Two students helped us. James Smith did a literature search and showed that readability rests not just in language, but in suitability for the readership. Anna Ellis studied 111 Education and Debate articles, comparing the original with the published version using the Gunning and Flesch readability scores. She found that our articles are hard to read, they get harder as you read them, and editing doesn't improve them much. She also argued that the scores were a crude tool because they don't take into account the fact that medical words have many syllables, nor that the BMJ policy is to spell out abbreviations. Anna also asked editors to rate subjectively the readability of various passages, and found that there was no clear consensus on which passages were more or less readable. Meanwhile, Marcus Müllner and Fabian Waechter have been studying whether our readers would like research papers presented in a more journalistic form. Early results suggest that our readers prefer the traditional structure. What have we done with these findings? We continue to try to use shorter words and sentences and to promote Orwellian good language (see below). We've tried to improve the titles of education and debate articles and introduced standfirsts and bigger pictures to make them more attractive. But we still haven't got a good way of measuring our readability.
Some of Orwell's principles:
George Orwell Politics and the English Language, 1946. |
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