Re: Grade-level writing - tool suggestions?

Subject: Re: Grade-level writing - tool suggestions?
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "Hughes, Linda" <Linda -dot- Hughes -at- respironics -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 06:24:51 -0500

Hughes, Linda wrote:


A "Provider Manual" for one of our ventilator units is written for a medically-trained audience. Not super-technical, but certainly high-school to college level. We need to rework the manual and reduce it to a 7th grade reading level for use by homecare patients and their families.

Linda,

Is this a situation where you have to comply with a regulation by showing an agency inspector a report from a piece of software that the manual is written at a seventh-grade level? If so, then I understand your need for a recommendation.

If it is instead a matter of satisfying your customers' needs (that is, an internally driven requirement), I think you might do better just to "be the ball" and do the editing with eyes, brain, and fingers and then do some usability testing with a few people grabbed off the street.

For this sort of thing I highly recommend Karen Schriver's Dynamics in Document Design.

Dick

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References:
Grade-level writing - tool suggestions?: From: Hughes, Linda

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