The Case for Readability of Crisis Communications in Social Media

The readability of text documents has been studied from a linguistic perspective long before people began to regularly communicate via Internet technologies. Typically, such studies look at books or articles containing many paragraphs and pages. However, the readability of short messages comprising a few sentences, common on today’s social networking sites and microblogging services, has received less attention from researchers working on “readability”. Emergency management specialists, crisis response practitioners, and scholars have long recognized that clear communication is essential during crises. To the best of our knowledge, the work we present here is the first to study the readability of crisis communications posted on Twitter—by governments, non-governmental organizations, and mainstream media. The data we analyze is comprised of hundreds of tweets posted during 15 different crises in English-speaking countries, which happened between 2012 and 2013. We describe factors which negatively affect comprehension, and consider how understanding can be improved. Based on our analysis and observations, we conclude with several recommendations for how to write brief crisis messages on social media that are clear and easy to understand.