For some years I proposed a "First Law of Scientific Journalism",
which stated, "The understanding an author has of a subject is
inversely (!) proportional to the number of syllables per word used
to explain it."  Some students and I conducted an informal test of
this at an SAA meeting.  We counted the average syllable per word
used in abstracts and selected papers to attend based on the index --
high versus low values.  The high value papers were consistently
incomprehensible.  (Let's see, the number of syllables in
"incomprehensible" is......)

I more recently discovered that the "First Law" (Title syllable value
of 2.0) already exists in style manuals as the "Gunnar Fog Index."
The latter is a better title (index value of 1.4).

Irv Rovner
Binary Analytical
(Index value of 4.0, but I deliberately chose a name that was
obscure.)