If the bid is difficult to understand, the lazy evaluator will simply skip the complicated bits. The government is pressing for greater comprehensibility and has a target of 50 on the Flesch-Kincaid score.
The Flesch-Kincaid reading ease test rates text on a 100-point scale. The levels are shown in the table below:
| Range | Ease of Comprehension |
|---|---|
| 0 to 30 | Very difficult to comprehend the meaning. Best understood by PhD graduates who are studying a complex subject! |
| 30 to 40 | More difficult and needs concentrated focus to discern the meaning |
| 40 to 50 | Difficult – complex and technical reports for expert use |
| 50 to 60 | Fairly difficult – needs some focus to comprehend |
| 60 to 70 | Standard – plain English, understood by skim readers and those aged 13 and above |
| 70 to 80 | Easy – children’s books |
| 80 to 90 | Very easy. Conversational English and marketing text for consumers |
We consider that we need to create text in a complex bid which targets 50 on this scale. By its nature, a technical bid is complicated and can be hard to understand for the less technical reader. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that the evaluator has the time or inclination to decipher complex sentences. We must make our bids easy to evaluate. If the readability, and thus the comprehensibility, is lower than 45 we will lose evaluation points.
There is an excellent readability checker built into Microsoft Word. You can turn it on by:
- File => Options => Proofing => Show Readability Statistics
- Then, when in the document, Review => Spelling and Grammar
Then you should examine any poorly scoring paragraphs and seek to improve them by:
- Using simpler words
- Shortening sentences
- Using the active voice
- Eliminating nominalisations
Run the Word checker again and keep changing the paragraph until the score is acceptable.
Key notes
- Turn on the readability checker in your word processing program.
- Rework each paragraph to achieve a score of 45 or above.
- Check the readability of the final document before sending it to the evaluator.
