Rudolf Flesch

Rudolf Flesch built the first widely-used readability formulas and crusaded for plain English in law, journalism, and education. His Why Johnny Can’t Read launched the U.S. phonics-vs-whole-word debate.

¶Core ideas

• Reading Ease score: a 0–100 measure based on sentence and word length
• Plain English: preferring concrete short Anglo-Saxon words over abstract Latinate ones
• Phonics: teaching reading via sound-letter correspondence, not whole-word recognition

¶Key works

• The Art of Plain Talk (1946)
• The Art of Readable Writing (1949)
• Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955)