On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 10:15:32PM -0500, Dale wrote: > Ashley Dixon wrote: > > > > Especially considering most Americans do not understand the system (the > > readability of the I.R.S. tax code has been under scrutiny for a long time), > > I wouldn't want to place the burden of conferring with such a convoluted > > system on anyone. > > I read a article once several years ago where a magazine contacted the > IRS and gave the same set of facts and asked the same question of over a > dozen different IRS help agents. You know, the ones that answer the > phone to help you. Given the same facts and the same question, they got > several different answers. It seems even the people at the IRS can't > understand it either.
I did a quick on-line search regarding this matter (and readability of English texts in general), and it seems like the I.R.S. tax code is incapable of achieving even a positive score on the Flesch readability index [1, 2], so your testimonial doesn't surprise me too much. The same algorithm has been applied to a quite a few public domain works in Literature and Philosophy over the last few centuries; some of the results are mildly interesting [3]. Although, considering Finnegans Wake attained a score of 62.8, I am dubious of the accuracy of this method (then again, it's very non- standard English, if you can call it English at all) [4]. [1] http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/305/Projects/FleschReadabilityProject.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests [3] http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/ [4] https://www.statslife.org.uk/culture/1572-how-unreadable-are-james-joyce-s-novels -- Ashley Dixon suugaku.co.uk 2A9A 4117 DA96 D18A 8A7B B0D2 A30E BF25 F290 A8AA
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