RE: Grade-level writing - tool suggestions?

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- rainbow -dot- com>]

 Dick Margulis [mailto:margulis -at- fiam -dot- net] suggested:
> 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. 

> 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.


Either way, I recommend doing an actual re-write, with brain 
engaged.

If you are required to meet some "objective" [haaaahahahahahahaaaaaa]
standard, to please some bureaucrat, then just do the job to the 
best of your ability and push the measurement task back onto the 
person who makes/oversees the demands. 

That is, if there is an explicit contractual requirement for 
YOU to buy specific software and generate a specific readout 
in a specific format, etc., etc., then you have already included 
the cost of acquiring that software (and training?) in your 
budget estimate, have you not?

But if the contracting entity has not specified:
 - the exact standard you must meet, 
 - how it will be measured, and 
 - your part in that measurement, 
then it is their problem, and you are only taking on grief 
if you volunteer to make it your problem.

If an inspector/contract-manager asks for the proof of 
compliance, you say:

"Here is the completed/revised document. I can provide it 
in any of these other formats (plain text, Word, RTF, HTML....) 
if those are better suited to YOUR measuring software. 
And I'd like a copy of the readout, please."

If they can't tell, just by looking at it, that your work 
meets the requirement, then they must be submitting your 
work to SOMETHING that does the determination for them, yes?
That SOMETHING is either a piece of software, which they 
must have, or it's a committee or a tame editor who does 
their reviewing. 

Does the contract require that you own a copy of the same 
measurement SOMETHING?  If it's software, then they need 
to specify precisely. If it's an editor... hey, hire the 
same editor to get you ready for her/his final review. :-)


/kevin (being practical about the whole thing)