Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

January 19, 2021

Communications in the Time of a Pandemic: The Readability of Documents for Public Consumption

Category:

Topic:

Keywords (Tags):

A majority of COVID-19-related documents produced by the WHO, UK, US and Australian governments were shown to be at or above recommended readability levels. Though the study suggests that the included US documents (n=10) are easiest to read among all the documents, the mean Flesch Reading Ease Score of US documents was a 53.1, which corresponds to a “difficult” readability rating by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Ferguson et al. (Jan 18, 2021). Communications in the Time of a Pandemic: The Readability of Documents for Public Consumption. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1111/1753-6405.13066