Not-so-plain English

[Paul R. Erickson]

Notes on the Plain English discussion from Tom Sticht

Both David Rosen and Paul Jurmo have made reference to some of the work
that I have done on "plain English" so I thought I would briefly comment
on some of this historical survey. I began work on what subsequently
became known as the "plain English movement" when I was at the University
of Louisville in 1966. There I was working with Emerson Foulke, the
director of projects funded by the American Printing House for the Blind,
on methods for improving the listening comprehension of blind students. In
that work we used readability formulas by Flesch and Dale-Chall to 
estimate the difficulty of materials that would be presented for listening
on recordings for the blind. We found that the readability formulas also
predicted listenability quite well, too.

In 1967, during the Vietnam War, I was contacted by the Human Resources
Research Office (HumRRO) of the George Washington University to work on
literacy problems in the U. S. military. The war meant that hundreds of
thousands of less literate young men would be entering the military
services and there was interest in what might be done to match reading
skills to jobs. I was asked to work on this problem because of the work
I had been doing on listening for the blind. It was thought that in
training, listening might be used in some cases as a substitute for
reading to overcome reading demands that were too hard for some personnel.
In this work, colleagues and I developed a readability formula called the
FORCAST formula (standing for FOrd, CAylor & STicht) that was especially
developed for job technical material and normed using adults, rather than
K-12 materials and students as the existing formulas were designed. We
used the FORCAST to determine reading difficulty of job materials and
compared the reading grade level of the materials to the reading grade
levels of skills of personnel. We found large gaps between the materials
and the skills of many personnel. This lead to projects on how to design
more readable and usable documents.

In 1973, the British Association of Settlements used the FORCAST formula
in the United Kingdom to determine the difficulty levels of functional
materials for adults and compared this to the abilities of adults in the
UK. This helped  secure funds for the UK's Right to Read program in the
mid-1970's, a major part of which was the BBC's award winning adult
literacy programs.

Also in 1973 I directed a project called the Army Training Literature
(ATL) project  that produced a Guidebook for the Development of Army
Training Materials that includes a hundred pages of illustrations of what
poorly designed materials look like before and  after being redesigned.
This guidebook also introduced the difference between "topic-oriented"
materials that academics produce and "performance-oriented" materials that
are needed in doing practical tasks. It was subsequently printed by the U.
S. Army Research Institute in over 3,000 copies and was used by numerous
corporations such as IBM, etc. and I recall that Linda Flowers used it
in establishing her course on technical writing at Carnegie-Mellon
University.


In 1976 when I became Associate Director of the National Institute of
Education, in charge of Basic Skills research, I directed work to
initiate and/or fund several projects on document design, one of which was
the Document Design Center that Jodi Crandall recently mentioned ( I think
this was a contract with the  American Institutes for Research and the
Center for Applied Linguistics if memory serves). We also worked with the
IRS and some other government agencies to help them get interested in
designing more usable documents (but as you can see from your 1040 forms,
this has a long way to go yet!).

I left the NIE in 1979 and went back to work with HumRRO. In 1982 I left
HumRRO to do independent consulting. Then in 1983 the Ford Foundation
asked me to do research on how the military services had trained and
utilized less literate personnel during mass mobilizations. In that work
colleagues and I formulated the "functional context education" (FCE)
concepts that included the ideas of designing job training programs so
that they could both accept youth and adults whose literacy and math
skills were lower than what such programs ordinarily expected. From this
work we published in 1987 a book called Cast-off Youth: Policy and
Training Methods From the Military Experience. Then the Ford Foundation
funded a series of workshops on FCE that I conducted in 1987. I gave two
of these workshops in Guttman Library at Harvard University  and I guess
that is where David heard me talk about the need for college graduates who
could write at a fifth grade level, meaning who could use plain English
and good visual design to make government and business forms and technical
manuals more readable and usable by us all.

For those who are interested in following up on some of the information
colleagues and I developed over the years on this topic, the ERIC system
includes many reports that can be accessed. I think this is an important
policy area for which the adult literacy education community has some
powerful inputs. I hope that many positive actions follow from this
discussion on the NLA list.

Tom Sticht
tsticht at mail.sdsu.edu
tsticht at aznet.net