The Unreadable Press

The New York Times told a piece of last week's news this way:

President Truman recommended to Congress today a sweeping revision of legislation under which the Executive Branch of the Government has been exercising extraordinary powers pursuant to declarations of a state of emergency by President Roosevelt in 1939 and in 1941. This step was foreshadowed in his message to Congress Feb. 3. ...

The tabloid New York Daily News told it this way:

President Truman today asked Congress to repeal 24 wartime control laws outright and listed 78 others he wanted to be extended or allowed to lapse.

The Times's Sunday Editor Markel (see above) had several ready reasons why nearly four times as many people read the tabloid Daily News as the Times. The Times scorns gossip, leg art and comics; but the fact is that even on the Times's home ground--the important news--the Daily News often says it better.

Why is the Times hard to read? Last week a "readability expert" offered one obvious answer: its words are too big, its sentences too long. To Robert P. Gunning, an Ohioan who makes his living by telling the press what is wrong with it, the Times is a favorite whipping boy. By his standards, it is harder to read than the Atlantic Monthly.

Gunning, who does business as Readable News Reports, has helped 30 U.S. dailies stop talking over their readers' heads. He urges them to try for the spoken-language level, where radio has operated for years. Among his clients: the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Star, United Press. His prize customer: the Wall Street Journal, which he says puts out "the most readable front page in the country" by shunning the technical jargon of the Street.

His yardsticks were developed by educators who wanted to improve on McGuffey. Gunning simply measures the number of words per sentence (a good average for newspaper stories: 16-20), the number of abstract words per 100 words, etc. He has no concern with felicity of phrase, or the worth of what a man is trying to say. Last week, after surveying editorials in half a dozen big U.S. papers, Gunning told what he found: "Most editorial writers seem to confuse dignity with pomposity. Their marathon sentences, foggy words and abstractions put their pieces completely out of reach of all but the upper 5 to 10% of their readers."

Gunning's advice: "Write as you talk. Most bestsellers, and even the King James version of the Bible, are written so sixth-or seventh-graders can read them. Why should a Washington correspondent write 'bilateral concordance' when he means 'two-way pact?' Why should a police reporter say an accident victim suffered 'contusions and abrasions' when he really means 'cuts and bruises?' "

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