Hi Sumana, I've found the advice from the Plain English Campaign pretty good - they have Drivel Defence (although I've not used it, so can't comment on it specifically):
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/drivel-defence.html Cheers, Kim Osman On 21/05/13 1:45 PM, "Sumana Harihareswara" <[email protected]> wrote: >When you're trying to write a blog.wikimedia.org entry or >wikitech-ambassadors email about a technical topic, but you want to make >sure nontechnical Wikimedians can read it, is there an automated check >you can run through? > >For general readability we have http://www.readability-score.com/ to >check, for example, the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease. My blog entry >https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-st >ops-problems-in-their-tracks/ >has a grade level of 11.5, meaning that it would be difficult for >someone to read it unless they had about as much English fluency as an >average US student in their last year of pre-college schooling. In the >future I will probably aim more for a grade level of 10 or so; we have a >lot of non-native English speakers in our community. I think it's too >difficult to rewrite everything in Up-Goer 5 http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ >or Simple English Wikipedia style, even for regular-person-friendly blog >entries about WMF Engineering,[0] but I am willing to be told if I am >wrong. > >Aside from general readability, I also want to be careful about using >jargon, and substitute more accessible terminology where possible. I may >whip up a script to check whether some text has words from >https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Glossary and the other site glossaries >in it, unless someone has a better idea. > >-- >Sumana Harihareswara >Engineering Community Manager >Wikimedia Foundation > >[0] I just tried rewriting a couple sentences from my blog post in >Up-Goer 5 style. "Now, we are looking forward to making more places to >give people their words and pictures, more quickly. The team is planning >to make another place like that." > >_______________________________________________ >Wikimedia-l mailing list >[email protected] >Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
