What Do You Know About Making a Document Readable and Usable?
Spent time the other day in a review meeting where repeatedly phrases like “we need to make this change in style so the document is more readable” or “well that is not really readable” were proffered by reviewers. I am sure that if I had asked the 10 plus people in the room what is meant by the term readability that I’d end up with 10 vastly different working definitions for the term. Some very outlandish definitions, too, given the behavior on display during the review meeting. In this case, I am positive some of the people attending the review meeting are active members of the Flat Earth Society.
I know I’d leave most people in the review meeting confused if I asked them what is the difference between document readability and document usability. For me “readability” usually means comprehensibility or how well a reader understands the message. In literature on written communication, readability usually means comprehensibility. “Usability,” as a term, refers to how well the reader can apply information related to their intentions or purpose of reading the document. Such as sending a document to FDA related to launching the testing of a new drug compound in humans. The FDA reviewers will read the document to establish in their mind whether the data collected by the drug sponsor shows the drug to be reasonably safe and has a meaningful pharmacological effect so that testing can move onto human subjects.
One of the problems with reviews is that many reviewers apply the wrong concepts to judge a document in terms of readability and usability. Assessing readability and usability of a document needs to be centered on what the reader intends to do with the document and how well you support the reader task. For instance, let’s come back to the example of submitting an investigational new drug application to FDA. This will be a fairly complex, data-rich document that looks at attributes of a drug compound that ranges from how the compound is formulated, to how it works on various body systems, to how it is eliminated from the body. Answers to these questions will be established from limited sets of information.
To succeed with this type of document there is the need to build out a set or pattern of relationships that allow readers to infer meaning from fairly limited information. That is, for the document to succeed, the author must to build out a schema that represents the relationships of a set of concepts within the very specific domain of developing a new drug compound. To succeed the schema built in the document must be structured to support reader expectations. In this case, readers at FDA. If the schema is incomplete or hard to follow, then the document is not usable and not readable. You can pour all the attention you want into style and grammar, but if you have a flawed schema, tweaking grammar and style will not improve the document one bit.
I end this post with the 1956 mission statement of the Flat Earth Society. Some good advice here that should be applied to how one thinks about document review.
Flat Earth Society Aim: To carefully observe, think freely, rediscover forgotten fact, and oppose theoretical dogmatic assumptions and replace with SANITY.
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