Lix and Gunning fog, and what on earth is she talking about?

A natural result of working with very highly educated people, in high-tech areas and in an academic environment such as Uppsala, is that I now spend a whole load of time in simplifying arguments and speeches and presentations. Ironic isn't it? I usually say that when you get beyond the point where your professional pride has taken a real beating from hearing the simple language you're using, then you're just starting to get there. You can almost never simplify your words too much - now there's a statement to chew over.

Consider this: readability, ease of comprehension, and simple digestability of language can be measured in various ways. Swedish can be tested according to a "Läsbarhets index" Lix (http://www.lix.se/) and English by various means. Here are some web sites:

http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp
http://www.read-able.com/
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt1/EditCentral.html

Take the Lix index for example: a bureaucratic, academic, complex and generally difficult language style will have a score above 50, childrens books under 25, and normal text or the average novel would be about 30-40.
If you take Obama's speeches, for example the victory speech in Chicago, and test chunks and put in pauses as line breaks, then you get an average around 20-25. Now, if anyone ever needs to reach people, to persuade and convince, then he does. One way to interpret this is to understand that convincing people does not depend on big words! It might help your self-esteem, but it certainly isn't helping anyone else. It's something else that does the work for you, not scientific terms or grammar worthy of a classical novel. Shakespeare didn't use big words. So, what's that something else? Ahhh, that takes a bit longer to describe.

Have fun pasting other people's text into the test sites :) You might suddenly understand why you never really could grasp what that person has been saying.