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I agree that metrics such as sentence length, syllables, paragraph
length, etc are important criteria. And so is good grammar. However,
documentation can excel in these areas and still be almost
unintelligible.
I know. I am currently working a contract job at a high-tech company.
One of my primary inputs is existing documentation that is grammatically
correct and which meets any readability metric, but Albert Enstien could
not figure out. (It also has very nice page layout). I really get the
feeling that the authors did not know what the product did.
THE keys to readability are for the writer to know the end user and to
know the product.
I agree with the individual said to give the documentation to some 10th
graders and ask for their opinion. There is no other way of truely
measuring readability.
Tony Markatos
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