The way of all Flesch By Erik Alsgaard 
Erik Alsgaard |
Thirty-eight percent of the people in Baltimore read at or below the fifth-grade level. A third of the city didn't graduate from high school. This, according to a recent Baltimore Sun news article. These statistics scare me. These statistics make me mad. These statistics should cause the church to get involved. I grew up in a house of readers. My dad read the newspaper every day. He still does. My mother read the newspaper, but usually about two to four months after the paper was dated. I learned to read, like many people, in first grade. ?See Dick. See Dick run. See Jane. Run, Jane, Run.? Remember? Mrs. Stoppert was my first grade teacher. Chestnut Hill Elementary School, 1965. I still remember the joy she showed when we finished a book. It served to inspire us to keep reading. My children are readers. Sarah, 18, thinks nothing of sitting in Starbucks at the bookstore, reading and sipping herbal tea. She sometimes reads books she hasn?t purchased. One friend thinks this is wrong. Sarah says that she has bought enough books to make up for the ones she hasn?t bought. Besides, Sarah says, she bought the tea. Zach, 20, reads different stuff. He reads things like ?Business Week? and ?Kiplinger?s Financial Newsletter.? He reads the business section of the Washington Post. Zach is a junior at Virginia Tech. He is studying business information technology. He knows a lot about how to use computers. He knows how to write something called ?code.? He is in his second month of an internship at a company called ?Integic.? He will be rich someday. My children, when they were in school, experienced something called ?DEAR? in the classroom. DEAR stands for ?Drop Everything And Read.? It worked like this. Students were expected to always have a reading book with them. At random times throughout the day, the principal would come on the intercom and say that it was DEAR time. Whatever the students were doing ? algebra, music, lunch ? they would have to ?drop everything and read.? And they did! We also encouraged our children to read aloud to us. Some experts say that this is one of the best ways to improve literacy levels and reading skills. All I know is that it worked. For me, reading is like breathing. I can?t imagine living without it. Literacy is one of those sneaky issues. Everyone is in favor of reading. No one that I know is anti-words. After all, ?In the beginning was the word?? But more than one out of three people in Baltimore can?t read this sentence or has trouble reading it. Houston, we have a problem. Which got me to thinking. If you can?t read the Bible, how do you learn the stories of God?s love? If you can?t learn the stories of God?s love, why would you go to church? Why would you go to church and possibly embarrass yourself when asked, in Sunday School, to read the lesson aloud? Those of you who read this space on a regular basis may be noticing something different right now. The difference is on purpose. Whenever we write for this newspaper, we run it through the ?Spelling and Grammar? tool in Microsoft Word. Maybe you?ve done that, two. (See ? it?s not perfect!) Whenever we do this, at the end, the computer tells us the ?readability? of the article. The computer also tells us how many passive sentences we have. (Passive sentences are bad.) The computer also tells us the ?Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level? of the article. The Navy developed the Flesch-Kincaid formula 25 years ago. Researchers wanted to calculate the educational grade level of comprehension needed to understand a given passage of text. To determine the score, take the average sentence length (in words) and multiply by .39. Add to that the average number of syllables per word multiplied by 11.8. (With me so far?) Now subtract 15.59 from that total. Usually, the computer tells us that our articles and columns are at grade 12. That is a problem. That is too high. When more than one in three residents in Baltimore reads at a grade 5 level, writing at grade 12 means our words are hard to read for many people. And what?s a newspaper for except to be read? Obviously, many people need to improve their skills in reading. The church must help in this area. Many are. We need more. And we here at UMConnection need to be more sensitive to the readability of our newspaper. Obviously, we need to write at a different level. Like this column, for example. I said earlier that there was something different. There is. Have you spotted it? Do you know what it is? Normally, these articles are at grade 12 or slightly lower. This one is not. As I end this piece, guess where it falls on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. (No fair peeking!) If you said grade 5, congratulations. You?re right. This one is at 4.8. | 
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