While readability formulas are intended to help writers and teachers of
business communications, the formulas have in fact been counter-productive
in several ways. The formulas don't really help writers to predict the reada
bility of their prose because they oversimplify, because they have not been
calibrated for adult readers, and because reading is so highly individual. In
addition, the formulas don't help writers to produce readable documents
either; though short sentences and words correlate with difficulty, they do
not cause difficulty. Finally, the formulas hamper the teaching of business
writing because they emphasize written products instead of the process of
writing and because they discourage teachers from employing practical
techniques that can develop students' abilities to manipulate stylistic
options.
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References
1.
Rebecca Pressman, Legislative and Regulatory Progress on the Readability of Insurance Policies (Washington, DC: Document Design Center, 1979).
2.
Helen J. Schwartz, "Teaching Stylistic Simplicity with Readability Formulas," paper read at annual convention of the American Business Communication Association, December, 1980.
3.
Walter Lubars and Al Sullivan , Guidelines for Effective Writers: Qualities and Formats (Medford, MA: Countryside Press, 1978), Malra Treece, Communication for Business and the Professions (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978).
4.
George Klare , "Readable Technical Writing: Some Observations ," Technical Communication24 (1977), 2.
5.
—, "A Second Look at Readability Formulas," Journal of Reading Behavior, 8 ( 1976), 129-52.
6.
—, Technical Communication, p. 2.
7.
Wilson Taylor , '''Cloze Procedure': A New Technique for Measuring Readability," Journalism Quarterly, 30 (1953), 415-33.
8.
R.F. Lockman , "A Note on Measuring 'Understandability'," Journal of Applied Psychology, 40 ( 1956), 195-96; quoted in Walter Kintsch and Douglas Vipond, "Reading Comprehension and Readability in Educational Practice and Psychological Theory," Perspectives in Memory Research, ed. L.-G. Nilsson, ( Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1979), p. 335.
9.
"The Process of Understanding and Judgments of Comprehensibility," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9 (1970), 87-93.
10.
Readability: An Appraisal of Research and Application (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1958).
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Janice C. Redish , "Readability," in Document Design: A Review of the Relevant Research, ed. Daniel B. Felker (Washington, DC: Document Design Project, 1980), p. 84-85.
12.
"Experimental Studies of Readability," Elementary English, 45 (1968), 166-78.
13.
G. Dale and J.S. Chall, "The Concept of Readability," Elementary English, 26 (1949), 19-26.
14.
Klare, " A Second Look," p. 147.
15.
Klare, p. 146-47.
16.
Klare, p. 147.
17.
Ernst Z. Rothkopf , "Structural Text Features and the Control of Processes in Learning from Written Materials," in Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of Knowledge, ed. R. O. Freedle and J. B. Carroll (Washington, DC: Winston, 1972), p. 315-31.
18.
Kintsch and Vipond, p. 362.
19.
Treece, p. 153; Lubars and Sullivan, p. 29.
20.
Rudolph Flesch , "A Dissenting Opinion on Readability," Elementary English, 26 (1949), 332-334.
21.
Klare, "AssessingReadability,"Reading Research Quarterly, 10 (1974),62.
22.
David Pearson , "The Effects of Grammatical Complexity on Children's Comprehension, Recall, and Conception of Certain Semantic Relations," Reading Research Quarterly, 10 ( 1974), 160.
23.
Klare, Technical Communication , p. 2.
24.
George Klare, The Measurement of Readability (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1963), p. 122.
25.
I.M. Schlesinger, Sentence Structure and the Reading Process (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 79-80.
26.
Pearson, p. 189.
27.
John R. Bormuth, Development of Readability Analysis: Final Report, Project No. 7-0052, Contract No. OEC-3-7-070052-0326, U.S. Department of HEW, 1969, p. 53. (ERIC No. ED 029 166)
28.
Bormuth, p. 19.
29.
Ronald Carver , "Word Length, Prose Difficulty, and Reading Rate," Journal of Reading Behavior, 8 (1976), 193-203; E.B. Coleman and C.R. Miller, "A Measure of Information Gained during Prose Learning," Reading Research Quarterly, 3 (1968), 369-86.
30.
Klare, The Measurement of Readability, p. 133.
31.
"A Reexamination of the Effect of Word Length on Recognition Thresholds," American Journal of Psychology, 88 (1975), 583-94.
32.
Klare, " Assessing Readability," p. 98.
33.
For generative rhetoric, see the work of Francis Christensen, Notes Toward a New Rhetoric (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), for a good introduction to sentence combining, see Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing, ed. Donald Daiker, Andrew Kerek , and Max Morenberg ( Akron: University of Akron Press, 1979), Williams' book is Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1981).
34.
For the formulation of these three goals I am indebted to my colleagues Marie Secor and Betsy Brown.
