Word: flesch
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TIME colleagues pushed for my transfer from Baghdad to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. They then joined my friends and sister Leslie Flesch in lobbying to get acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee to admit me to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, making me the first reporter wounded in combat known to have received such treatment at the premier hospital reserved for soldiers...
...received that help not because of a grade I had earned, a story written, or lives saved; it was for being me. I resolved to return the love by being less self-absorbed. I promised my kids I would stay out of war zones. My brother-in-law, Michael Flesch, came for a three-day visit, the longest time we had spent alone together in years. We hung out at Walter Reed by day and frequented Washington haunts by night...
DIED. Rudolf Flesch, 75, unambiguous champion of plain English; of congestive heart failure; in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Vienna-born, he emigrated to the U.S. at 27 and wrote more than 20 books about language and learning, most notably the 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can't Read, which attacked the flash-card school of reading instruction and sparked a resurgence of the more traditional phonetic method of sounding out words syllable by syllable. A readability test devised by Flesch spurred a generation of journalists to write short, uncomplicated sentences but caused critics to complain that his tenets shackled richness...
Guerrilla warfare against legalese is busting out all over. For example, the Federal Trade Commission has assigned Language Expert Rudolf Flesch, author of several books on plain English, to redraft some ordinarily impenetrable regulations. Joseph Califano has recently hired Barnard College Political Scientist Inez Smith Reid to improve and simplify Health, Education and Welfare Department prose. Among other agency heads arguing for brevity and clarity, Interstate Commerce Commission Chairman Daniel O'Neal last spring issued an exhortation stating: "English is a remarkably clear, flexible and useful language. We should use it in all our communications...
...plain-language requirement for health and accident policies. The new federal Pension Reform Act insists that company booklets be written "in a manner calculated to be understood by the average participant." And the new federal Warranty Law states that product warranties have to be "simple and readily understood." Linguist Flesch cautions that most of the rewrites do not yet rate a 60 on his scale-the level, he says, of the New York Daily News or SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. But be it hereinafter understood that whereas the aforementioned and previously established methodology of contract composition has been adjudged dull and devoid...