With messaging getting shorter and shorter we will soon be back to Ugh! I wasn’t there at the time but I guess that the first spoken sound of the Homosapiens was something like Ugh.

Sounds would have developed over time and became recognisable words which then were strung together to form phrases and then what we now recognise as sentences. Skipping forward a few thousand years through the development of vocabulary and grammar we have always had a communication style that differed for each audience.

The Gunning Fogg Test http://tinyurl.com/bbnsw9 measures the readability of English text. Basically the test produces a score. The lower the score the higher proportion of the population will find the copy easily readable. Therefore the Daily Mirror and Sun will have a lower score than the Times and Telegraph. However it is interesting that The Times and the Telegraph scores have become lower and lower as each decade passes. The score for a text message would be very low indeed.

Whereas in the past a low Fogg test result would have indicated the copy was written for the less literate. Texting, twittering and emails have changed all that. It is now acceptable to communicate in ungrammatical fragments with copy getting shorter and shorter. Getting your message across has become even more difficult as the audience now used to shorter messages just won’t concentrate long enough for you to explain your proposition in detail.

A new communication order is developing where editorial copy and ad copy are coming closer and closer together. This is not a real problem as long as the author recognises the fact. If you have got this far down you and maybe just a few haven’t got back to ugh quite yet.