Writing to Linguistically Diverse Audiences
Writing effectively for an audience with a wide variety of backgrounds is difficult. This page provides several resources to help writers craft their message to reach the widest possible audience.
American Translators Association's Online Directories
The American Translators Association maintains two searchable databases. The first database is a directory of several thousand individual translators and interpreters. The second database contains a listing of language service companies.
The Fog index was developed by Robert Gunning to measure how difficult something is to read. His Fog Index in The Technique of Clear Writing (McGraw-Hill) is considered the most reliable formula for testing writing. It is not an index of how good writing is, but of how easy it is to understand. Using the index, teachers and administrators can test the communications they send to parents.
This link is to a National Science Foundation guide on proposal writing.
When writing communications to parents with limited English proficiency, it is especially important the documents be easily readable. The principles in this document are meant to help writers in writing clearly for any audience and come from the writer's experience teaching non-English speaking students.
Clear Language and Design: Reading Effectiveness Tool
This online tool is designed to help writers gauge at what reading level their work falls. The tool asks users to input 30 sentences from the document to be tested then answer a series of questions about the content.
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