ABSTRACT
Once upon a time many years ago in the middle of Africa (Uganda, 1961) I found a need for readability. I was assigned by the university to improve the reading of a group of community college instructors who were in turn going to improve the reading skills of their students. The practical problem was that the students had difficulty reading manuals for autos and other machinery. I knew, from some years running a reading clinic in the United States, that you can make more progress if you start the students out in relatively easy reading material so the students can read the materials with some comprehension and success. But how do you tell these African instructors how to select “relatively easy” reading materials in technical English? The answer, I deduced, was to use a readability formula. There not being any easily accessible readability formulas lying around in Uganda, I decided to make one. It worked for the Uganda context and, with modification and much more supporting research, it has served many thousands of teachers removed in both time and distance from that small group of community college instructors in the early 1960s.
