Diabetes in the News: Readability Analysis of Malaysian Diabetes Corpus

Abstract

Background: This paper describes a study to evaluate the readability scores of Malaysian newspaper articles meant to create awareness of diabetes among the public. In contrast to patient-specific sources of information, mass media may potentially reach healthy people and help them avoid becoming part of the diabetes statistics. The study selected relevant samples from the Malaysian Diabetes Corpus and used an online tool to score and display their readability using Flesch Kinkaid Reading Ease (FKRE) as the main indicator. Result: The average readability for the materials is low at 49.6 FKRE, which may impede the uptake of information contained in the articles. Trend analysis reveals that there is not much variability in the years covered by the corpus with the articles from 2016 scoring better than other years. Feature analysis of articles with the best and worst readability indicates that medical practitioners may not be the best spokesperson to reach the public. It also indicates that simple sentence structures could help improve readability. Conclusion: There is still much room for improvements in attaining good public health literacy through mass media communication. Public health and media practitioners should be vigilant of the language aspects of their writing when reaching out to the public.