Does plain English really need to be about maths? ngo.media writer Sarah Myers thinks not.

I got an email the other day about SMOG.

Not the problem London has with air pollution and bad weather, but an acronym ironically relating to plain English.

SMOG stands for Simple Measure of Gobbledegook a system that apparently helps you answer the question "how 'readable' is your text?".

Readability calculator?!

The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education and Nottingham University have developed a SMOG calculator. It involves counting up the number of words in your paragraphs that have more than three syllables. Then you need to work out some square routes, do some multiplications, work out some averages and you end up with a "readability level".

Simple. If you're Carol Vorderman.

Plain English please!

Those of you who attended our Good Writing for Charities seminar will have heard me harp on passionately about plain English. I'm a big fan. I'm a plain English bore. I've been known to mutter "use clear and simple language" in my sleep, scribble "GET RID OF JARGON" in big, inappropriate red letters on all sorts of documents, and don't even get me started on acronyms.

If I could, I'd have the Plain English Campaign's definition in 64 point type on every office wall in the country: "Plain English is writing that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it."

So, I'm definitely not knocking the principle of "readability". I'm just not sure we need another word for it.

Top tip

If you feel the need to make it all about numbers, try this next time you're writing a document in Word:

, Go to "Review" and chose "Spelling and grammar".
, Click on the "Options" button in the bottom left hand corner.
, Under the heading "When correcting spelling and grammar in Word" you'll see a box marked "Show readability statistics". Check this box.

Every time you finish spellchecking your document, you will get a box showing you statistics for the average number of sentences per paragraph and words per sentence. It will also show you the percentage of "passive" sentences you've included in your writing.

If this figure is low (less than 10%) your text will probably be clear and easy to understand.

See, you certainly, don't need to have an A-level in maths to work out whether what you've written can be understood.

If you fancy a chat about plain English, get in touch with ngo.media