"Government brochures barely intelligible." The text of an article in the Saskatoon STAR-PHOENIX, 18 September 1987. The article has a readability rating of university level on the Fry and DaleChall scale, and a rating of between grade 11 and 12 "at the most lenient." Using STYLE on the article produces a readability rating of 12.5 on the Kincaid scale. Most government publications can't be easily read or understood by the average Canadian, concludes a survey carried out for Southam News. The result, say literacy experts, is that many Canadians aren't warned about dangers such as workplace hazards and can't benefit from government programs that they're entitled to. York University education professor Gary Bunch tested more than 30 publications for "readability" using two standard formulas. The publications were selected at random from pamphlets and booklets issued to the public by Ontario, B.C., Newfoundland and the federal government. Nearly half of the material required university-level education to read, although two-thirds of Canadian adults never got beyond high school. A mere four publications rated as readable by someone with only Grade 8 education - the level of 3.7 million adults. The results indicate little change since a 1970 task force condemned the "sheer unintelligibility" of most federal publications. Official surveys in the late '70s and '80s also gave a failing grade to provincial health and safety publications. "It's not maliciousness; it's ignorance," says Bunch. "I'd guess that the people who write these don't even talk to a factory worker or someone who hasn't had a solid basic education." While some experts criticize readability formula as misleading, Bunch's findings are supported by the exclusive Southam Literacy Survey of 2,398 Canadian adults. One-quarter said they need help reading publications from governments and business and four of 10 functional illiterates volunteered they had difficulty. Even among fully literate Canadians, more than one in five reported needing help with such written materials. Income tax tables are the toughest. Seven out of 10 Canadians couldn't use the tax chart to pick the right amount of federal taxes to pay on taxable income of $13,990. Little has been done in Canada to make government materials more readable - a sharp contrast to other Western nations. The federal government has focused on research rather than reform. For five years, the Legal Services Society in Vancouver has produced citizen's guides to the law that are easily read. But both the guides and the approach have been slow to catch on in Canada. It's a huge fight to try to get some people to understand that the world isn't filled with print junkies all with PhDs," says Carol Pfeifer, the society's director of public legal education. A survey of how small claims courts are explained showed improvement in the readability of pamphlets, says Pfeifer. But too often the material was written from the viewpoint of the legal system rather than for the person who needed the information. "The people who most often need the advice often can't understand the publications," agrees Bill Shallow, a Newfoundland government expert in adult education. As U.S. President, Jimmy Carter said in 1978, when he ordered American government regulations written in Plain English: "The federal government has become like a foreign country, complete with its own interests and its own language." These judgments are borne out by the York University survey that found many essential pieces of information are written well over the heads of the intended audience. A federal pamphlet on how to apply for a Social Insurance Number, for instance, rated at a senior high school or university reading level. So did five pamphlets by the B.C. ministry of human resources explaining benefits and rights. By contrast, the Ontario minister of justice tried to explain divorce and separation to children by writing at the Grade 8 or 9 level and another Ontario pamphlet aimed at babysitters managed Grade 7 prose. "A lot of care was taken with the writing of these. You can see the difference," says Bunch. The York professor used two formulas, named after their inventors, Fry and Dale-Chall, to determine a range for the reading level. The formulas look at such things as sentence length, numbers of syllables per word and the familiarity of words. Short sentences and short words always score best. Worst among the publications was the federal government's free trade promotion kit, a glossy collection of fact and fiction that flooded supermarkets in May as part of a $12-million advertising campaign. By checking random 100-word blocks, Bunch rated the main booklet, "Securing Canada's Future," and four other inserts from the 200,000 kits. All came out at between second- and fourth-year university level. "It's as if they weren't talking to the ordinary people, but only to the uppermost slice - politicians, business leaders and editors." Yet the federal government once knew how to write for ordinary Canadians about an urgent national issue. In 1931, a 30-page pamphlet from the Department of Pensions and National Health tried to calm fears about a terrible disease called Infantile Paralysis, later known as polio. It managed this technical subject with prose no higher than a Grade 7 reading level. "If they could do it 50 years ago, you'd think there would be more of it today. Anything important can be written so that people with only basic information can understand it. Once they managed with simplicity and grace. Now they have to dazzle us with their complexity," complains Bunch. The reading barriers created by big words, jargon and wandering sentences aren't limited to government publications. Other surveys have found most trade union newspapers are too difficult for their intended readers, staff manuals baffle retail workers and even materials for adult literacy students lack consistency. And newspapers, popular magazines and school textbooks are constantly being surveyed to see if they're shooting wide of their readers. One U.S. expert isn't so positive that poor readability is an accident. Michael Fox, director of a Washington, D.C., literacy group, says the dense prose of many official forms is one way of making sure that too many people don't apply for benefits. It's OK to rewrite computer manuals, it's OK to have a Plain English law for well-off people to understand their mortgages, but when I want the food stamp applications written more simply, I'm accused of wanting to 'dumming down' things," says Fox.