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Abstract

This research is part of an attempt to discover significant factors of readability for connected expository prose. Keeping the content of expository paragraphs identical, I varied their forms using the Functional Sentence Perspectivists' rule for relating old and new information within the sentences of connected discourse. Rule-governed forms had identical or closely related sentence topics; variants had only remotely related sentence topics. In three tests involving subjective readability judgments, a very significant number of the 455 total high-school subjects found the rule-governed forms more readable than their variants. Thus there is reason to believe that the relationship between sentence topics is probably a very important factor of readability for expository prose.

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Readability of Expository Paragraphs with Identical or Related Sentence Topics

Abstract

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