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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Jun 30.
Published in final edited form as: Health Commun. 2017 Nov 10;34(2):212–219. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2017.1399509

Table 2.

Understandability of the major statement and inclusion of quantitative information (N = 50).

Mean Standard deviation
Number of sentences 6.68 2.49
Words per sentence 15.60 3.79
% Long sentences (10 or more words) 58.43 24.48
% Complex sentences 26.77 19.94
Number of medical terms 3.00 1.58
Reading level
 Fry grade reading level 11.02 1.76
 Gunning fog index 13.10 2.43
 Flesch-Kincaid reading ease test 49.56 10.64
n %
At least 1 medical term 48 96
Used lay language to explain medical terms 7 14
At least one abbreviation 16 32
Passive voice 16 32
Syntactic ambiguity 9 18
Double negatives 4 8
Risk frequency or severity numbers or visuals 0 0
Risk frequency words 35 70
Risk severity words 30 60
Comparative information 8 16