What’s wrong with this sentence:
A recent study about the complexity of the women’s dense breast notifications (DBN) determined that some letters are too complex for the average person to understand, considering that about 20 percent of the population reads below a 5th-grade level.
I think the article actually has a good point to make but they should try phrasing their opening sentence differently.
I suppose the average person isn’t going to be in the bottom quintile of people.
I don’t see the problem. They looked carefully at women’s breasts and concluded that people can’t read.
This sentence brought to you by the ferociously complex letters “D,” “B,” and “N.”
Ding, ding, ding.
They’re right in thinking that it’s wrong to think that most people are going to able to read test results for which healthcare professionals are the target audience without help. The alternatives would seem to be to adjust the reporting of the test results to the actual target audience or to have professionals interpret the results for them.
The test results should be:
Negative result: You’re healthy, party on!
Positive result: You’re going to die very soon, party on!
michael reynolds wrote:
I don’t see the problem. They looked carefully at women’s breasts and concluded that people can’t read.
Hey, the text is up here!
The alternatives would seem to be to adjust the reporting of the test results to the actual target audience or to have professionals interpret the results for them.
If memory serves, reporting of mammograms used to be like other medical tests which are reported to physicians who then notify the patient. Some years back, I assume a time saving decision was made to report directly to the patient and at that time results were pretty straightforward so it wasn’t a problem. Now that a gray area has been identified, reporting those results to patients is more complicated.