The Art of Plain Talk by Rudolf Flesch Pdf
Bryan Garner on Words
Plain talk: A conversation on simplicity with Rudolf Flesch
Bryan Garner / Winn Fuqua Photography
Amid the most innovative writing specialists of the 20th century was Rudolf Franz Flesch (1911–1986), who immigrated to the United states of america from Austria in 1938. Having already earned a doctorate in police force from the Academy of Vienna, he enrolled in Columbia University and earned a PhD in library science. While working at Columbia's Reading Laboratory, Flesch became interested in the burgeoning field of reading comprehension.
Seeking to bring the scientific method to touch on readability, Flesch advocated a simple and direct style of writing: curt paragraphs, curt sentences, few prefixes and suffixes, and relative informality. He developed two measures for assessing readability: (1) reading ease and (ii) human involvement.
Although some criticized his insistence on plain way, Flesch's books proved enormously popular and influential. Since his death, variations on his readability formulas have been integrated into all sorts of software (such every bit Microsoft Word) to assess the quality of prose. Even today, lawyers accept much to learn from Flesch.
As I've done with many long-gone authors, I sat down recently to interview Flesch well-nigh two of his acknowledged books from the 1940s: The Art of Manifestly Talk (1946) and The Fine art of Readable Writing (1949). His answers are (with small-scale adaptations) verbatim.
Garner: In your first volume, The Art of Apparently Talk, y'all develop the idea that writers and speakers are always guessing about whether they're getting their points across.
Flesch: There's zero more important to you as a speaker or writer than that your audience understand you; and on this betoken you can never be sure.
Garner: That'southward unfortunate, isn't it?
Flesch: It ways yous may never larn how to make yourself better understood. As long as you're simply guessing, you have no way of knowing whether your guess was good or bad, and whether you're getting better or worse.
Garner: You lot try to teach people "plain talk." How do you define plain talk?
Flesch: Evidently talk is mainly a question of language construction and of spacing your ideas. If you don't conduct simplification too far into primer style, your readers volition non only stay with you, but they'll read y'all faster, bask it more, sympathise better and remember longer. Every single one of these statements tin exist proved by scientific prove.
Garner: I know y'all brought empiricism to carry in your work in analyzing writing styles. You've been peculiarly hard on lawyers.
Flesch: They're the near notorious long-sentence writers. The reason is that they won't let the reader escape. Behind each interminable legal judgement seems to be the idea that all citizens will turn into criminals as soon as they notice a loophole in the police force; if a sentence ends earlier everything is said, they volition end reading right there and jump to the chance of breaking the dominion that follows after the period.
Garner: Only isn't that questionable psychology?
Flesch: What is sure is that legal language is hard fifty-fifty on lawyers.
Garner: What's the best advice on writing, then?
Flesch: It's what the Fowler brothers said in The King's English (1906): Before allowing yourself to be tempted by the showier qualities, try to be straight, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid. Prefer the familiar give-and-take to the far-fetched, the concrete word to the abstract and the short to the long.
Garner: That yardstick would exist pretty unkind to most legal writing today. I'thousand thinking especially about federal regulations.
Flesch: If we analyze the Federal Register, it is obviously designed to make reading as difficult equally possible. The sentences simply never terminate, colloquial root words are carefully avoided, and at that place is never a hint of who is talking to whom. The Federal Register is not supposed to be read at all. Information technology simply prints things so that anytime, somewhere, some regime official tin say: "Yep, but it says in the Federal Register ... ." All this government stuff, in other words, is not reading affair merely prefabricated parts of quarrels.
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Bryan A. Garner, president of LawProse Inc., is the writer of Legal Writing in Apparently English language and more than twenty other law-related books. His most recent is the fourth edition of The Redbook: A Transmission on Legal Style (2018). Follow on Twitter @bryanagarner.
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Source: https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/plain_talk_simplicity_rudolf_flesch
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