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{Home > About > Centers & Programs > IAP > Fellowships : Tim Giles}

Tim Giles

Tim Giles is a graduate student in the Rhetoric Department. Tim is also teaching undergraduate classes in the department, and is currently on temporary leave from a university in Georgia.

Q: What sort of research are you doing with Medtronic, and who are you working with?

Tim: Beth Crobot is my contact at Medtronic; she's a former Ph.D. student here in the Rhetoric Department. Daphne Walmer is the director of the area I'm working with, and the topic is readability, and that's been an area of interest for me going back to my master's degree, which I finished in 1986.

Q: What sort of research did you do for your master's degree?

Tim: In the early 1980's, word processing programs were just really starting to become something that were being used by the public in general. I had just started using word processing that year. I had heard about readability formulas, and they go back to ancient times. The ones that are in use now you may have noticed – they're in the tools section for Microsoft word. You can run readability on anything you've written, and it does a Flesch Reading Ease formula which gives what you've written a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being highly readable, and 0 being probably gibberish, I don't know. Gibberish with lots of polysyllabic words. The other one is a Flesch-Kincaid which gives it a reading grade level. You've probably heard that most newspapers are written at a 6th grade level—that's what that one does. At that time, I hadn't even heard of Microsoft word – I was using things like Wordstar, and Volkswriter, and hadn't even gotten into WordPerfect at that time. There were grammar-checking programs around at that time, and the readability formulas were starting to be included with the grammar-checking programs, and that was the focus of my thesis. What I actually did was I took a passage by a 17th century British engineer and I had some undergraduate and graduate students re-write it. Then we applied a readability formula to what they had written, and then we took what they wrote and broke it up into syntactic passages, so we could see if there was any type of correlation between syntax and readability. Of course, the readability formulas don't claim to measure syntax, the Flesch Reading Ease is a readability score that's calculated by the number of syllables per word and the number of words per sentence. It's hard to say how meaningful that formula is to technical communication.

Q: How did you find out about the Industrial Affiliates Fellowships?

Tim: I found out about the Medtronic fellowship through the departmental listserv, and I looked at all the fellowships, and all the topics, and I saw one on readability, and thought "hey, I could write on that." But then they said, "well we all ready know all the arguments against readability," and I thought "well if they all ready know all the arguments against readability formulas I don't know what I could really add to it," but then I started thinking about it, and I decided I could tell them about my research.

Q: Why do you think Medtronic is interested in readability?

Tim: The reason Medtronic is interested in readability is because the federal government wants them to start applying readability formulas to their technical support literature, to make sure that it's readable for a variety of audiences. I think the problem with readability so far is the way it analyses documents. My background with writing is more from the creative writing aspect, and quantifying prose is something that a good humanist would find offensive [Laughs]. I think the thing is that there's reality to deal with, that the government wants them to have a readability formula, so if we could come up with not just a readability formula, but with a series of formulas, because the prose can be very nicely written, you can have sentences that aren't too long, the vocabulary can meet the audience, but what if it's really tiny print, and long paragraphs with no headings, or no visual aids. I'm not going to address the visual rhetoric; what I'm going to explore is whether there's any research that relates syntax to readability, and there is some out there.

Q: So you had some ties with the research you had done before you became interested in the fellowship?

Tim: That's where I started, I've been going back and looking at the research I did for my master's thesis, and I've been hitting some electronic databases and seeing what's going on in psychology, education and linguistics, and things like linguistics are going to have a ton of material on syntax but not anything that's relating it to readability formulas.

Q: So you've been working with Medtronic since late spring, when the Fellowships started for this year?

Tim: So far, I've met with Medtronic over the summer – went out there and had lunch, and I introduced my idea of looking at syntax and readability, then they had me write a proposal over the summer, and I did that. Medtronic is paying me a stipend for the fellowship. This is something I'm interested in finding more about myself, and I would like to help them out; I would like to work with them. I don't have any office space out there, I'm just going to do some research and then do a couple presentations. One is going to Daphne Walmer's technical writing department, and the other may be an STC meeting, but I'm not sure about that right now.

Q: What are your impressions on the fellowship project? Do you think it's been a good step for you, or the research has been interesting?

Tim: Oh yeah, I think it's great to have funding for research like this—there are people who do stuff like this for a living. So far it's been a good experience. One thing I want to say is that during my master's program I interned with Northern Telecom—they call themselves Nortel these days. That was like, I started working in May, and I worked through the middle of August, and worked for human resources, and basically edited an employee magazine for them, and that was really good experience and I'd like to get something like that when I came back for my Ph.D., but the problem is that I've talked to Medtronic and Unisys and they want someone who can make a longer commitment than I can make. I can't do that right now because I'm under certain time restrictions.