The Dutch government aims to keep their texts simple and clear. This as part of its policy to make its contents accessible without discrimination. In order to achieve this goal, a lot of texts and forms are being reviewed on their complexity and readability, guidelines are created on how to write readable simple texts and a lot of research on text readability is being conducted. Bureau Taal (The Language Agency) has written a very nice booklet on language readability and levels of understanding. Basically, there are 4 levels, with 2 sublevels. A1 being the most simple text, and D2 the most complex. European Research indicated that most government texts are written in C1 and C2 level, while only 15% of the population fully understands those texts.
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Month: January 2008
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Note to gov: don’t make your texts too simple