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Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Hear that? That’s the bee in my bonnet. You can tell when I get a bee in my bonnet because I write about it in the church newsletter. I try to get it out from under my bonnet early in the week so that I don’t rant about it in the Sunday sermon. Who wants to hear about the bee in the rector’s bonnet when he’s supposed to be talking about the Bible?

So. Today’s bee in my bonnet. Here goes. The clue is in the heading. KISS. It’s a mnemonic. It stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid and it was yelled at me by a senior priest early in my ministry after I’d preached an especially cryptic sermon. Keep It Simple, Stupid. He had a point. People shouldn’t need to understand seminary level theology to get something out of a sermon.

In my short and unremarkable career in the British civil service they told us to use the Gunning Fog Test. This is a nifty little way of checking that your written communication can be understood by the person you are writing to. You apply a formula that considers the length of the sentence and the number of words of three syllables or more. Then you do something fancy with those numbers and you get your Fog Index score. This number is the school-grade reading level of the piece of writing. So, an index of 7 (like this article – I’ve checked), could be understood by a person with seventh grade reading skills. An index of 12 could only be understood by  someone at a High School senior reading level. Anything over 18 can only be understood by readers at a college graduate level. The maximum Fog Index score is 20. Anything above that is just impossible to understand, no matter how brainy you are.

So, here’s my bee. Buzzzzzzzz. Government forms and websites. This morning I read some official Homeland Security text about visas for religious workers. It was awful. I copied and pasted it into a Fog Index calculator, and it spewed out a score of 19.75. In other words, you need to be substantially more than a college graduate to understand it, and it is only 0.25 away from being totally incomprehensible. Only 2% of the US population can read this piece of DHS writing. And don’t forget who needs this information – people who probably don’t have English as their first language!

There seems to be a belief that the longer a sentence is and the more 3-plus-syllable words it contains the smarter the writer is. Wrong. It just shows that they know nothing about how to write. Communication is all about what YOU want to say. So you’d better say it in a way that can be understood by the other person. If not, then you’ve done yourself no favors; you’ve made your ideas meaningless.

Thank God for Jesus – the Word. A simple, easy-to-understand Word wrapped in flesh that no one can misunderstand. God loves us.