Diabetes in the News: Readability Analysis of Malaysian Diabetes Corpus

Abstract

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, thus preventing them from becoming part of the diabetes statistics. Articles published within a selected corpus from the years 2013 to 2018 and related to awareness regarding diabetes were sampled, and their readability was scored using Flesch Kinkaid Reading Ease (FKRE). Features of three articles ranked as the best and worst for readability were qualitatively analyzed. The average readability for the materials is low at 49.6 FKRE, which may impede the uptake of information contained in the articles. 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. There is still much room for improvement 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.