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“Their tongue is a deadly arrow, it speaks insidiously; With their lips they speak kindly to their neighbor, but in their hearts they build bonds for him.”
(Jeremiah 9:8)

You all, of course, have seen how our president reads the texts of his speeches on paper sheets, although he periodically raises his eyes from them. That is, all the texts were written to him in advance, but do you know why? Because no improvisation can compare with a text that was written using a special program and checked using the so-called FOG index or “Flash formula”. Therefore, today we will introduce you, dear VO readers, to another very strong “public relations”, and at the same time well-prepared journalism.

There is no “nebula index” in this text...

However, we will have to start with something sad. Every year, when I come to class with students, I ask them the same question: “What should they constantly remember when they write a text on an A4 sheet so that it turns out to be “readable” in its content. And they seem to be saying the right things... “You need a plan”, “you need to try to write interestingly”, “you should pay attention to the paragraphs(!)”, “you need to write simply” - to which I always answer - “and you just write g... ”, in a word, they say “what needs to be done.” Nobody says “how”! This, by the way, is the problem of our society. Everyone knows what is needed. Nobody says exactly how to achieve this. This happens in the case of writing text. Moreover, the kids are in 11th grade, aren’t they, where they were taught to write essays. So I have to tell them that everything that they told me here should be, as our Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev put it... “don’t give a damn and forget,” since the most important thing to remember, in addition to the general idea of ​​the content, is one single rule that sounds like this: “There are no two words on one page! Two nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns!” And... that's it! The text will line itself up so that it will be a pleasure to read! The eye will not cling to the same words and verbal communication will carry the reader smoothly, like an escalator, to wherever anyone wants? Auto RU! Of course, this is never realistically achievable, and it’s clear why. But... this is the very ideal to which we must strive. And it is on this simple rule that an entire system for managing public opinion is built, and a technology has been created that is absolutely impossible to resist.

Well, now we can go back to the beginning, to the fact that one of the very powerful means of influencing mass audiences is the so-called fog index, or “nebula index,” an indicator adopted in English-language journalism and serving to to determine the degree of “readability” of any text. Moreover, it is based on complete sincerity on the part of anyone who decides to use it. That is, this is not deception, but just... a respectful attitude towards the people for whom you write. That's all. Well, the first thing you need to know when analyzing text materials is that any printed text printed in black letters on white paper is absorbed and understood by people better, the fewer repeated words it contains in the amount of, yes, one sheet of paper in the format A4, which means that, ideally, you need to strive to ensure that in your text on each page there are no two identical words in principle, even if in practice such a requirement is most often impossible to fulfill. How to learn to write like this? Easily! To begin, you take any newspaper or magazine text and colored markers of several colors.

When you analyze a text, you take a colored marker in your hand and use it to cross out all the identical words that you come across. You may come across a lot of such words in newspaper material, so that an unpleasant fact will immediately become obvious to you: the newspaperman who wrote the “dregs” you encountered did not think at all, or was in a very, very hurry somewhere, and at the same time he hoped that “ people are eating up” and so on! Naturally, a public relations specialist can blame both him and those who hired such a journalist for all these blunders in his response article, complaining that “Mr. X” doesn’t know what basic things. or members of the editorial board.

There are verbal communications, that is, written and oral speech. And there is non-verbal - gestures, facial expressions, touch, smell... The person on the left shows a completely closed position and you can assume that he is afraid of you or... lying! Especially you should not put your fingers in a lock on the TV screen.

You then use the Flash formula (authored by Rudolf Flash) to determine the readability index of a given text, thereby causing your opponent even more trouble. The readability index shows the degree of difficulty in perceiving the text and the educational level of the individual required for this. To analyze the text, you will need to select at least two not very large passages, each containing 100 words, or one full text of a small volume. Then you need to do the following:
A. In the text, count all sentences, words, syllables, taking into account that numbers, abbreviations and all individual characters in it must be counted as independent words.
B. Now it is necessary to determine the average length of a sentence, for which the number of words is divided by the total number of available sentences.
B. After this, the average word length is determined. In this case, the number of syllables is divided by the number of words.
D. Now all that remains is to substitute the results into the readability formula and multiply the average sentence length from the text by 1.015. Multiply the average word length by 84.6. Then add these two values ​​and subtract their sum from 206.835.

Here's the general formula: Readability Index = 206.835 – [(average sentence length × 1.015) + (average word length × 84.6)].

Table 1
Interpreting the Flash Readability Index
Index Readability Level Education Level

90–100 Very high 5 classes
80–90 High 6 classes
70–80 Above average 7 grades
60–70 Average 8–9 grades
50–60 Below average 10–12 grades
30–50 Low College
0–30 Very low College graduate

There is also Robert Gunning’s formula, which makes it possible to determine the text difficulty index based on the average sentence length and the percentage of words that consist of three syllables or more. The index is calculated based on the available number of sentences in two (at least) text passages, also containing 100 words in each of them. The number of words must be divided by the number of sentences they contain. Then count how many words consist of three or more syllables (except for words that begin with a capital letter and such complex words as, for example, the word “vacuum cleaner”). The result obtained is substituted into another formula:
Difficulty index = 0.04 × (average number of words per sentence + number of long words per 100 words).

table 2
Interpretation of the Gunning Index
Obscure index Education level
17 College graduates
16 IV level college student
15 III level college student
14 Second-level college student
13 First-level college student
12 Student of 10–12 grades of secondary school
11 Student in grades 8–10 of secondary school
10 Student of 6–8 grades of secondary school
9 Student of 4th–6th grade of secondary school
8 3rd grade elementary school student
7 2nd grade elementary school student
8 1st grade elementary school student

The “Incomprehensibility Index” makes it possible to find out the relationship between the level of education and the perception of the text.

And there is also the formula for audio perception of text (FAT), which was developed by Irving Fang, and which allows you to determine the “hearing perception” of those texts, lectures and speeches that are transmitted via radio. The FAT index, as it turned out, is most closely correlated with the same “Flash index” (r = 0.96).

Here the average number of words in words and sentences of the selected passage is calculated (but monosyllabic words are not taken into account). Like the Flash Index, the FAT Index measures the level of education of listeners that enables them to easily understand the content of what they hear. Fang found that to perceive standard television news, the “FAT index” should be approximately 12 units.

In this photo, both are sitting incorrectly, but the girl on the right has a more closed position. You can not do it this way!

Tests that test text readability and listening comprehension provide, of course, only a rough idea of ​​how well your message will be understood by your chosen target audience. The use of various slang words, special terms, as well as numerous dialectisms can greatly complicate its understanding, although the results of testing for Flash, Gunning, and Fang will say the opposite. So their importance should not be overestimated either: but they undoubtedly help authors understand whether their material coincides with the ability of its target audiences to assimilate it in terms of reading it and, of course, understanding it. These are quantitative and fairly objective indicators that allow you to understand how accessible the style of your material is to others.

But when using the fog index, you should keep one subtlety in mind. After all, the formulas of these scientists were calculated for texts in English and when translating them into Russian, it is necessary to take into account the specifics of translation from one language to another. And it lies in the fact that the English language has increased information content compared to Russian. And the difference reaches an average of 20%, therefore, when translating from Russian into English, you must remember that all sentences in English need to be shortened by 20%, but when translating from it into Russian, on the contrary, they should be lengthened by exactly the same amount. But these obstacles are easily surmountable today, and on the Internet there are ready-made formulas for calculations using the Flash and Gunning formula, where you just need to substitute your indicators, and the program will calculate everything itself. This, by the way, is how texts are written for presidents. So that they are clear to everyone. They are clear to both a 14-year-old boy and an 80-year-old man. That is, the widest possible target audience is selected if, for example, he has to speak from the screen. For scientists, the text is written separately. Separately for workers. That's why presidents are always so convincing.

If you tell all this at such a press conference, then the person you tell all this about will never get clean! “And this is the one who wanted to stupefy and fog the people.” Therefore, written election texts must be taken very seriously. Very!

And now you should know that some people test themselves using Flash in order to improve the quality of their own articles, but others use this technology as a means to discredit texts written by a competitor, or even himself! Make it easier than ever. You just need to highlight the same words in his text with a black marker, and then complain that he has a vagueness in his words, and therefore in his thoughts, and Mr. Namer’s language is too poor. Then you check his text according to Flash and Gunning, and this gives you the right to say that his text is difficult to read, that it is very difficult to comprehend auditorily, and from all this you can make a number of important assumptions: a) this person “simply does not know how to write” (but then why is he trying to do this?); b) if he hired a bad journalist, and he was so “indifferent” to the assigned work, then he does not understand people. And, moreover, he himself did not bother to check the text written to him; c) he did all this to specifically “fog and stupefy” his gullible readers or voters, and also to demonstrate his apparent intelligence. As a result, you can write, or - if you are speaking at a press conference, say that in any case, the author of this text is by no means needed where he is trying to get through. And repeat: “Fuzziness in words is fuzziness in thoughts,” but do we need another fool in power? It is also important to add that those who write such bad materials simply do not respect either their readers or their potential electorate!

Then everyone who came to your press conference should be asked to check all this so that no one accuses you of slander. Give them a printout, colored markers and let them underline. “Just look for yourself!” – and that’s it, nothing more needs to be said. Then you talk about all these formulas and let someone check them themselves. The most important thing to remember is that non-specialists will forget 90% of what you said in exactly 90+1 days, since such people usually have a very short memory. But “Mr. X”, who with his writings tried to “deceive the people” with the help of the “fog index”, will remain in his memory for a very long time, and the most important thing in all this is that there is not the slightest deceit or fraud in these actions and lies, i.e. no “black PR”. And there is only your honesty, and also integrity, of course, decency, and, of course, high professionalism.

Readability Index

The readability index is a measure of how difficult it is for a reader to perceive a text. The readability index can be calculated based on several parameters: the length of sentences, words, the specific number of the most frequent (or rare) words, etc.

Flesch Readability Index

The most popular measure was created by Rudolf Flesch, originally for English. It evaluates the complexity of the text using the following formula:

Or:

FRE = 206.835 − (1.015 × ASL) − (84.6 × ASW)

ASL - average sentence length in words.

ASW - average word length in syllables (eng. average number of syllables per word)

The FRES (Flesch Reading Ease Scale) index is distributed as follows:

100: Very easy to read. The average sentence length is 12 words or less. There are no words with more than two syllables.

65: Plain English. The average length of a sentence is between 15 and 20 words. On average, words have 2 syllables.

For the English language, a value of 90-100 corresponds to an easy text for primary schoolchildren, 60-70 - a text that school graduates can read, texts with an index of 0-30 are intended for people with higher education.

Due to the fact that in Russian the average sentence length is shorter (due to less use of function words such as articles or auxiliary verbs) and words are on average longer, several attempts have been made to develop a Russian-specific version of the measure, e.g. adjusting coefficients when comparing indices obtained for original English texts and their translations. Below is one of the options for such an adaptation.

FRE = 206.835 − (1.3 × ASL) − (60.1 × ASW)

In general, most methods for assessing text complexity based on readability indices for information and analytical documents in Russian provide scores that are outside both the interpretable range of values ​​and the reference values. At the same time, the results obtained are characterized by a high degree of correlation, since the developers use one mathematical model of linear regression, as well as uniform text parameters (average word length, average sentence length). However, readability indices are not adapted to tests for adults. A professional should not have difficulty understanding polysyllabic words. Ultimately, the factor of complexity is the semantics of the text and the abstractness of its presentation. Indicators based on readability indexes are not well interpreted because they cannot be directly used to predict the processing time of a given person.

11. Propaganda and Public Relations - the relationship of terms.

PR and propaganda. Regarding propaganda, there are two main directions of opinion. According to the first direction, propaganda and PR are practically no different from each other: both concepts mean the use of certain technologies to effectively introduce any theses into the mass consciousness. Nevertheless, the majority of PR specialists believe that it is wrong to call their activities propaganda: propaganda allows for the distortion of figures and facts in someone’s interests, while PR is based on truthful information. Propaganda has a rigid attitude and seeks to force people to accept a certain point of view, without being interested in whether they want it or not. PRs are smaller in nature and only offer people to take advantage of some information. And then voluntarily accept certain opinions and ideas. Propaganda focuses on a one-sided impact on an individual or group; PR necessarily involves establishing a two-way communication mechanism, receiving and taking into account a counter signal from the audience.

Flesch formulas) Flesch readability formula, developed by. Rudolf Flesch, predicts the ease of reading and people. interest in written material. The formula for reading ease (RE) is RE = 206.835 - 0.846wl - 1.015sl, where wl is the average word length in syllables, and sl is the average sentence length in words. For calculations using this formula, either the entire text is used (if its volume is small), or from 3 to 5 random samples of 100 words each from an article (or from 25 to 30 such samples from a book). A word is any combination of letters or numbers surrounded by spaces, incl. elements such as don"t, ASAP, 1984, 82,354 and full-length. To count the number of syllables in a word, you simply say the word, phrase or characters and count the syllables. Thus, the average length of a word in syllables is the number syllables for every 100 words; VAT has three syllables, and "1984" has four, like the word "hippopotamus". To determine the average sentence length, the number of sentences in the sample is counted, including the last sentence if the 100th word is in the second half of that sentence A sentence is considered a complete thought; in that sentence, the words at the end of a complex sentence would qualify it as two sentences. Incomplete sentences and broken sentences are considered complete sentences. Substituting these two values ​​into the formula typically produces a score ranging from 0 to 100. RE scores 90 to 100 indicate high reading ease (such as one might find in comic books), with texts containing approximately 123 syllables for every 100 words and 12 to 13 sentences. Any person with a four-grade elementary school education (i.e., proficient in reading) should be able to answer 75% of reading questions. Readability scores ranging from 0 to 30 indicate high reading difficulty, such as can be found in scientific and specialized texts. Such texts contain an average of 192 syllables per 100 words and only 3-4 sentences, suitable for college graduates. Flash also developed the people indicator. Human Interest score (HI): HI = 3.635pw + 0.314ps, where pw is the average percentage of “personal words”, and ps is the average percentage of “personal sentences”. Personal words include all natural gender nouns, all pronouns except neuter pronouns (if they refer to things rather than people) and the words people (when used with a plural verb) and folks. Personal sentences include spoken language (distinguished in quotation marks or otherwise in the text, but not quotations or words in quotation marks used in an improper sense), questions, commands, sentences addressed directly to the reader, exclamations and grammatically incomplete sentences or parts thereof, the meaning of which, as is implied, must be derived from the context. HI scores also range from 0 to 100, with scores ranging from 0 to 10 indicating “boring” text, typical of scientific and specialist journals. Containing an average of 2% “personal words”, such text, as a rule, does not contain “personal sentences”. Scores ranging from 60 to 100 indicate dramatic text, as exemplified by works of fiction that average 17% personal words and 58% personal sentences. Without a doubt, the RE formula overestimates reading difficulty. In any case, she is not sensitive to the use of metaphors; she does not make allowances for long words that may be well known to the reader (for example, Massachusetts); she can "cheat" into judging a sample of text consisting of many sentences and short words as extremely easy; and it does not take into account both the semantic and syntactic structure of sentences. However, when used in combination with an appropriate dose of common sense, F.F. makes it possible to compare, on the basis of a single scale, both the ease of reading (which makes it similar to standard reading tests) of various texts, and interest in them. See also Measurement, Psycholinguistics, Reading Disability R. Kaschau

Gunning Nebula Index or Fog Index shows the readability level of the text.

This method of testing the comfort of text perception is named after its creator, Robert Gunning. At first it was intended for journalists to avoid vague language in the writing. Currently used by copywriters to determine the degree of simplicity of the text for readers.

The Gunning index is calculated using the formula:

Fi = (Nws + Nwt) * 0.4
Nws - number of words in a sentence.
Nwt - the number of words in one sentence of 3 or more syllables.

The original formula for the Gunning Nebula is:

For texts in Russian, a correction factor of 0.78 is applied.
The number of compound words is words with more than four syllables.

The calculation determines, with an accuracy up to the level of education, how ready the reader is to understand what is written.

The following Fog Index values ​​are accepted:

70 and above - no special training required;
- up to 70 - secondary education;
- up to 60 - intellectual level of training;
- up to 30 - understanding requires a scientific level of training.

By checking the text for readability using this method, you will determine whether it is difficult to understand or overloaded with terms, because the simplicity of the text is a significant factor in its success. You need to write competently, with meaning, but do not forget about “friendliness” towards the reader.

The index is calculated as follows:

• A text fragment of 100 to 200 words is isolated.
• The number of words in sentences is counted. We count numbers and dates as one word. We divide complex sentences into 2 parts.
• We divide the number of words by the number of sentences and get the average length of the latter.
• We take into account the number of words with 3 or more syllables (except for compound words, proper names, verbs complicated by declension, case, tense).
• Divide the number of polysyllabic words by the total number of words. We get the percentage of polysyllabic words in a text fragment.
• To the resulting figure we add the average sentence length.
• We multiply this value by 0.4.