Readability is the Only Metric

What you can measure, you can improve.  Whether you need creative content for e-commerce or step-by-step instructions for machine repair, you must reach your audience.   Microsoft Word offers metrics for readability, from the Grammar and Spelling checker, under Tools.   We have no quantified methods for creativity, invention, cleverness, or insight.  We can measure word length, sentence length, and sentences per paragraph.  

It is not perfect. In fact, it can be gimmicked, tricked, and gamed.  But it works.  On a project to develop a multiprocessor industrial controller, the other technical writer was a young guy from an advertising agency.  He did not know manufacturing, but he was good writer.  We enjoyed finding some of the many failings in the MS-Word readability scales. We still used them.  They proved that we documented the interactive debugger to a 6th grade reading level.  When the line is down, no one is looking for a literary experience. You need answers.

Texas Department of Information Resources
IT Policy - Originally at 12.9 reading level

Same IT Policy - Rewritten to 12.0 reading level.

Of the 300,000 main entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, only 3,000 are Basic English; and most of us speak only 10,000 distinct words.  The average college-educated American recognizes about 100,000 words.  Whether "fardels" in that list is putative.  So, Hamlet's rhetorical question might pass the readability score, but not carry meaning.  Whether "putative" is in your speaking vocabulary may be arguable.

The fact remains that we have an objective measure for readability. 

Also on Necessary Facts
Visualizing Complex Data
Documentation is Specification
The Art of Typography
 The Genius of Design
How to Hire a Technical Writer

Start the presses!

The fundamental principles of composition are constant.  Styles are invented, transformed, evolved.  Good styles depend upon the adaptation of principles and then validate those principles.  The composition may be poetry or prose, music or dance, sculpture or painting, but the same principles govern: order, structure, and motion; rhythm, melody, and harmony; contrast, conflict and resolution.  These make a symphony or a skyscraper or this page. 

Typeface is a film by Justin Nagan about the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Company and the Wood Type Museum of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.  For about a hundred years, wooden type was the preferred mode for very large printing, from political protest placards to circus posters to billboards, and everything else that required type more than 72 points (1 inch) in size. These letters were larger than your hand, some a foot high. 

The film also ties in the re-birth of the old letter presses, history not just as it was but the adaptation and assumption of traditional tools and media to new expressions, bringing a “crazy growth in letter press printing.”  Students in university graphic arts classes make the pilgrimage to Two Rivers and then apply their insights on Chandler and Price, Steracle, and Vandercook presses.  At the museum, they acquire a three dimensional understanding of letters that is not available from  computerized typesetting.

The bonus features in this disk deliver the nuance and context.  Among them are an extended history of wood type and “The Most Ambitious Type in the World: Louis John Pouchée.” 

When I win the fight with Blogspot, these blogs begin with an opening paragraph in blue Helvetica Bold 12 point.  The body is in Georgia.

Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

 “Since millions of people see and use Helvetica every day, I guess I just wondered, "Why?" How did a typeface drawn by a little-known Swiss designer in 1957 become one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words fifty years later? And what are the repercussions of that popularity, has it resulted in the globalization of our visual culture? Does a storefront today look the same in Minneapolis, Melbourne and Munich? How do we interact with type on a daily basis? And what about the effects of technology on type and graphic design, and the ways we consume it? Most of us use computers and digital fonts every day, so are we all graphic designers now, in a sense?” 

Also on Necessary Facts 

Documentation is Specification
Art & Copy 
Objectified, a film about design by Gary Hustwit
The Genius of Design