Last week’s speculation in this column on the present reading age of The Times – which a reader recalled being put at 12 in the 1960s – elicited a score of replies. Among the printable ones (see me at break, the rest of you) was this from Julie Luckraft-Voges:
“The reading level of any printed material can be calculated as follows using the Fogg Readability Formula:
1) Take 100 words starting at the beginning of a sentence.
2) Count the number of sentences.
3) Count the number of words with three or more syllables.
4) Divide 100 by the number of sentences.
5) Add the number of words from step 3.
6) Multiply by 0.3. 7) Add 5.
“Taking a sample from the Feedback column, I have calculated that the reading age is 17.6, which is pretty much what I remember being told by ‘experts’ years ago, ie, that The Times has a reading age of 18 years. In contrast, the reading age of The Sun is more like ten years.”
I had actually started to count 100 words from Wednesday’s leader page to check on this when it occurred to me that Ms Luckraft-Voges was having me on – think of a number, double it, add 127 and so on. Fortunately curiosity got the better of me, and I Googled “Fogg Readability Formula”. (Readers unfamiliar with the verb “to Google” should ask a small child.)
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Not only is it real, but it goes hand-in-hand with the marvellous SMOG Readability Formula, or Simple Measure of Gobbledegook. That’s more like it – something we can all use on a daily basis. I envisaged a handheld device that you could point at a page of type, or even at somebody speaking, and it would light up green, amber or red according to the gobbledegook level, but the reality is more prosaic, involving lots more counting of words and syllables, and then the application of a “SMOG conversion table”. I lost interest at this point, but for those feverish to know more, http://uuhsc.utah.edu/pated/authors/readability.html has a good description.
Meanwhile, Richard Bray, of Middlesex, sent me a photo of his six-month-old son reading The Times (I thought junior looked rather bored, frankly), and Jean Binner, of West Sussex, wrote: “While I was staying with my daughter, I came downstairs hoping to read The Times while waiting for breakfast. However, my ten-year-old granddaughter had got there first. Her father said that every day she reads out Modern Morals, which introduces the first argument of the day.”
Readers of some editions on Tuesday were treated to the same story twice, as Geoffrey Ling, of West Sussex, (among others) pointed out: “Should not one of today’s two articles by Adam Sherwin concerning the Blue Peter scandal have been entitled ‘Here’s one I wrote earlier’?”
This is known in the trade as a double. In the words of the stock reply beautifully crafted by a former colleague: “It happens occasionally in the hurly-burly of nightly newspaper production, when reports are moved from one page to another between editions and the left hand is momentarily unaware of the activities of the right.”
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Or, in the mysterious words of our production supremo: “Our mistake. We typeset the page but did not configure the EMS pairing equipment.” I like that hurly-burly stuff much better.
Matthew Martin’s cartoon on the back page of times2 used to attract roughly equal quantities of praise and opprobrium, leading me to set up the Office Of You Can Please All Of The People Some Of The Time, or Offplease for short, as regular readers of this column will know. So we ousted it to make way for the new game, Codeword, and what do we get?
In the red corner, June F. Miller: “For the last week I have been without my daily fix of Word Watching, only to suddenly find it at the back of the Register (by sheer chance) – what are you thinking of? Please get rid of that stupid letterless crossword that you have introduced, or at least redesign your puzzle page to accommodate all the much loved mind teasers.”
In the blue corner, Philippa Russell: “Thank you for the new Codeword puzzle; I am already an addict. To my dismay I find it is missing from the Saturday Times. Must I suffer a whole weekend of abstinence?”
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No danger of Offplease going out of business, then.
E-mail feedback@thetimes.co.uk; fax us on 020-7782 5046; or write to Feedback, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TA