For starters, this week, I would like to point out that reading this column makes you special. And I don't say that just to flatter you -- or me. You can congratulate yourself on being a better reader than roughly half of U.S. adults.
An awful lot of Americans are pretty poor readers, it turns out, and their children may be paying the price. And I'm not talking about failure to help with homework.
Car accidents are a major cause of death and injury to children, and research has shown that about 80 percent of car seats are installed wrong, which doesn't help. A study in this month's journal Pediatrics suggests a disturbing reason for all those incorrectly installed safety seats: Parents can't understand the instructions.
Not because they're clumsily translated from, say, Urdu. We all know how opaque some of those can be ("Only in order green light, do not switch to avoid danger event!"). No, the parents can't understand the instructions because they're just too hard.
The researchers discovered that instruction manuals for car seats are generally written at a 10th-grade reading level. Unfortunately, at least 25 percent of American adults read at or below a fifth-grade level, and nearly another quarter read at about an eighth-grade level.
They would be better off leaving the car seat installation to a high school sophomore, in other words -- assuming they can find one who reads at his or her grade level.
The obvious solution is to dumb down the instructions, but that will be hard because of the lawyers. The lawyers like to stick in a lot of legal jargon for liability reasons. Long sentences and big words reduce readability, and heaven knows lawyers love the big words and dependent clauses.
But what do we mean by "readability"? Is this just another hard word? Well, yes and no. You can get a feel for readability very easily; fortunately, it is not rocket science, which would put it past even more of the population.
Notice the difference in readability between these two passages:
1. "Attorneys for manufacturers of automobile security products for juvenile passengers overburden consumers with significantly more verbiage than is warranted in order to impose limitations on liability litigation in the event the vehicle is involved in a collision."
2. "Lawyers for child car seat makers use big words so you can't sue when you wreck the car."
Anyone can tell the difference between "see Spot run" and a William Faulkner novel, but it can be more precise (and complicated) than that. Experts have come up with many tests for readability and ways of assigning various texts to an appropriate age or grade level. Typically, these formulas factor in the number of syllables in words used and the length of the sentences.
I used the Fry Graph for estimating reading ages by grade level to analyze various pieces of writing I had on hand. This is how I know that you are a better reader than most: Last week's column was written at a ninth-grade level. And that sounds about right to me, since I'm functioning most of the time at about a ninth-grade level.
That's only one notch above the Post-Gazette's Kids' Corner column. I analyzed one of those from a couple of weeks ago and found it written at an eighth-grade level, which makes it one of few parts of the paper comprehensible to about a quarter of adults.
For reference, books written at the eighth-grade level include "The Wind in the Willows," "Anne of Green Gables," "Treasure Island" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
But The Kids' Corner is too hard for that fraction of adults reading at a fifth-grade level. Books written at a fifth-grade reading level include the Hardy Boys series, "Pippi Longstocking" and the "Little House" and Harry Potter books. This means that, for all parents to have a shot at understanding car seat installation instructions, they have to be written in the language of "Misty of Chincoteague."
This readability stuff is an eye-opener. For one thing, it explains declining newspaper readership. Someone who can't decipher this column is going to be hopelessly at sea trying to wade through a dense state budget opus or a complex op-ed piece on foreign policy.
Or even the Associated Press story we ran about car seat instructions. That, it turns out, was written on a college level. Good luck, Dick and Jane.
Samantha Bennett can be reached at sbennett@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3572.
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