When composing for a global audience, you want your document to be understood by readers whose native language is not English. Rachel McAlpine wrote an excellent article in 2006 titled "From Plain English to Global English". The article included recommendations to make your documents readable and easy to translate. Unfortunately, the article is no longer available. However, a copy of the article with additional material, has been found here:

https://www.angelfire.com/nd/nirmaldasan/journalismonline/fpetge.html

Near the end of the article, Rachel McAlpine describes the McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score. This numerical score is a function of the number of words in the document, the number of miniwords (3 or fewer characters), and the number of sentences. This VBScript program reads text from a specified text file and calculates the McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score.

You can copy any text from a web site or document and paste it into a text file using Notepad. Be sure to save the file using ANSI encoding (not Unicode). Do not include code, tables, or images. Include only text.

The output from the program might look similar to below:

McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score - Copyright © 2006 Rachel McAlpine
Script by Richard L. Mueller, Copyright © 2012, Version 1.0
----------
File: ADLogonHours.txt
Number of words: 1322
Number of mini-words: 561
Number of sentences: 98
Words per sentence: 13.5
McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score: 19.2 (very easy to understand)

The Readability Scores have the following interpretations:

I find it useful to run the script on individual paragraphs of my articles. Often, just one paragraph will have a high score. The score usually is greatly improved by breaking up any long compound sentences into two shorter sentences each.

Eflaw.txt <<-- Click here to view or download the program