On Friday, Sept. 28, Hewlett Packard released the “Incomprehensible Press Release of the Week” according to The Wall Street Journal Online Business Technology Blog. This particular release was described as “possibly the most jargon-packed prose we’ve ever seen.”
Taking advantage of a little quick analysis and sorting using some handy Microsoft® Word and Excel tools, I’ve come up with some interesting facts about the announcement. For example, this document consists of 44 sentences, 28 paragraphs, 1094 words, and 6533 characters. The average paragraph contains 2.4 sentences consisting of an average of 23.9 words. Now that’s pretty wordy! However the average word contained only 5.8 characters; doesn’t seem to complex, does it? I didn’t find a count of the average number of syllables per word, however. The grammar checker does tell us that only 4% of the sentences are passive; that’s a good thing.
Microsoft’s grammar checker includes two additional “readability” scores that clearly point out the complexity of the announcement. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now understand what those measures mean!
The Flesch Reading Ease Test indicates materials that are easier or harder to read. For example, the higher the number, the easier the content is to read; the lower numbers indicate more difficult passages. A score of 90-100 is considered easily understandable by an average 5th grader; 8th and 9th grade students can understand passages with a score of 60-70. Articles with results between 0-30 are best understood by college graduates. Sorry, a passive voice there…
Reader's Digest has a readability index of about 65 and Time scores about 52. H-P’s announcement rates a whopping 15.7, considerably lower than the Harvard Law Review which has a general readability score in the low 30s.
Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula translates the 0–100 score to a U.S. grade level, making it easier for teachers, parents, librarians, and others to judge the readability level of various books and texts. It can also mean the number of years of education generally required to understand the text. H-P’s announcement comes in at a high school senior level, 12.0.
The most often used words – aside from “and” and “the” – were Hewlett Packard or the abbreviation, H-P, which appear 28 times. Other words that are used frequently are:
| Business | 25 |
| Service/services | 22 |
| Technology/technologies | 18 |
| Data | 14 |
| Help/helps/helped/helping | 13 |
| Information | 13 |
| Customers | 12 |
| Solutions/solutions | 12 |
| Center | 11 |
| Manage/managing/management | 11 |
| Statements | 11 |
Slice it anyway you want, all these numbers still don’t tell how understandable a certain block of text really is. Seemingly simple words can be arranged in a totally incomprehensible way. According to Ben Worthen, who posted the WSJ piece, “read the whole thing … if you want to find out what it feels like to have your eyes roll all the way into the back of your head.”
Discussion
By Noel Ward on Oct 03, 2007
The PR weenie who wrote the release --which, sadly, is far from being the worst I've seen-- should be kept away from any device that allows them to put words on a screen or page. People who write that poorly simply cannot be helped. More frightening is that it was approved and sent out.
By Jean-Marie Hershey on Oct 03, 2007
The fact that this flabby example was approved and distributed reminds us that what used to be called "reading for comprehension" is also in decline. Whether Johnny can't write because he doesn't read, or doesn't read because he's glued to a tube or monitor all day, the fact remains that we’re losing not only the ability to distinguish between good writing and bad writing, but also the formal discipline to prefer (and use) one instead of the other. Ken Smith gets it right in a slim volume called Junk English, in which he catalogs hundreds of cheek-burning “language atrocities” drawn from print and broadcast media and grouped as "Fat-Ass Phrases, "Free-for-All Verbs," Hyphen-Monsters," "Obese Prepositions," and "Palsy-Walsy Pitches," among others. Smith also observes:
“Junk English is much more than sloppy grammar. It is a hash of human frailties and cultural license: spurning the language of the educated yet spawning its own pretentious words and phrases, favoring appearance over substance, broadness over precision, and loudness above all. It is sometimes innocent, sometimes well intended, but most often it is a trick we play on ourselves to make the unremarkable seem important…. The result is Edmund Burke’s tyranny of the multitude merged with George Orwell’s Newspeak, a world of humbug in which the more we read and hear, the less we know…. Junk English is the linguistic equivalent of junk food – ingest it long enough and your brain goes soft.”