Written evidence submitted by Professor James Hartley,
Keele University (COM0099)

Professor James Hartley has conducted applied research in this field for over 30 years.

1. I invite you to look at the written submissions before you.  These, if I may say so, are typical of documents in the sciences.  Their layouts are dull and unattractive (although some are helped by ‘bullets’ and by numbers).  Not all of them are easy to read.  They contain lengthy sentences and long words.

2. I submit that there are three things that people producing science documents should do.

The first is to consider the layout.  Not everything needs to be printed in a portrait style and a single column of text.  The initial choice of page/screen-size and orientation remarkably affects people’s perceptions of documents.  Appropriate choices for type-sizes, type-faces, background colours, etc.,  are important. Writing for Apps is different from writing for academics.

The next is to test the material to see if it ‘works’.  There are at least three ways of doing this:                         

• Expert-based measures require ‘experts’ to assess the text for content.
• Reader-based measures require that we study readers using the texts.                                                                
• Computer-based tests examine the readability of the text.

There is an academic literature on all of the matters but it is now widely known or practised.

3. If the committee wants to do something about science communication I suggest it should consider these matters as well as ‘the text’.

The ESRC’s Society Now is a good example of what can be achieved that could be emulated by others

The Department of Graphic and Written Communication at the University of Reading might be encouraged to work in this area.

May 2016