Readability: Reading/Writing Tools for Measurement.
Alice S. Horning · The Journal of Advanced Composition · 1987
In a recent and comprehensive review of readability research, George Klare composes a picture of the current state of our knowl edge of readability. He makes an important distinction between research on predictions of readability and research on production factors. This distinction is useful because it leads to new ways of analyzing the problem. Klare says that there are certain measurable factors known to be useful for predicting readability (683, 703-4). Among these are counts of content words, syllables, and the like?all things countable by various readability formulas. There are also certain features of text production that figure prominently in readability?cohesion and propositional density, for example ?which are either already measurable or soon to be measurable by computer. Thus, while neither prediction variables alone nor pro duction variables alone provide a complete picture, taken together the two provide a much improved analysis of readability. Such combining has proven helpful in analyzing data which resists other analysis, such as the material in a study to be discussed below. Also, such combining yields an analysis that taps both text factors and reader factors as a way to get at real readability. Since the resulting insights are pertinent to the problem of measuring and teaching readable writing, they can be of use to writing teachers as well.