Educational material is meant to assist the targeted audience in dealing with a given aspect. As such, the message should be clear, precise, and easy to understand. The language should also be in such a manner that it can be easily understood by the audience. As such, technical terms should be simplified if the target audience does not understand them. Readability is generally the extent to which the audience can read, interpret, understand, and apply what they have learnt.
Mayo Clinic (2013) wrote an article entitled, “Diabetes care: 10 Ways to avoid diabetes complication.” The target audience for this article is the patients living with diabetes. The main aim of the article is to make sure that the people understand what risks they face and the methods that they can put in place to avoid these complications. The article outlays the 10 point advice in a very clear and precise manner.
The first step is about making a conscious choice to manage the diabetes complications. It is only way to make sure that the management process will be successful. There are also other factors that need to be considered. For instance, there is an indication that one should not smoke as this habit leads to digestion problems. There is also need to keep check on the blood and cholesterol levels, follow up on important vaccines, among other steps.
Mayo Clinic (2013) gives a precautionary measure and explains why this measure is important. To a great extent, it can be argued that the article has high readability. In this case, readability is defined as the extent to which the target can read, understand, interpret, and put the advice into practice. A readability test on this article was performed using the readability test tool (ead-able.com, 2013).
The results of the readability test indicate that as per the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease stands at 58.9, which is average. The analysis further broke down the details to some important aspects. The number of sentences is 48 with 591 words. The average word count per sentence is 12.31. There are 99 complex words, which is an approximately 16.75% of total words. Form this analysis, it emerges that the readability of the article is not very high. As such, it is likely that some people might read and not understand the text while others might not read it at all. As such, it might fail to realize is intended objective.
There are a few measures that can be taken in order to increase the readability of the article. One of these is by reducing the number of complex words in the text. A count of 99 complex words for the article is very high. This could contribute to the low readability level. In order to improve this, the authors could use phrases of words to explain the complex terms. This would reduce the complexity of the reading, thereby making it more readable.
Reduction of the words per sentence could also help in improving readability. As it stands, the article has an average of 12.31 words per sentence. This is quite a high count. Too many words in a sentence often lead to confusion or loss of meaning. Therefore, by reducing the number of words per sentence, Mayo Clinic could greatly increase the readability of their article, thereby reaching out to more of the expected audience.
References
Mayo Clinic. (2013). Diabetes care: 10 Ways to avoid diabetes complication. Retrieved on 30th Nov. 2013 from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/diabetes-management/DA00008
Readable.com. (2013). Readability Test. Retrieved on 30th Nov. 2013 from http://read-able.com
