Background for a New Syntactic Complexity Formula.
Alvin Granowsky, Morton Botel · The Reading Teacher · 1974
READABILITY is a highly com plex matter, as anyone w o at tempts to control it knows. Signifi cant factors such as content, style and the all-important motivation and background a reader brings to the materials do not lend themselves to quantifiable handling. In practice, in formal guidelines and intuition are the means for controlling these essentials of readability, a fact readily acknowledged by developers of readability formulas. Commonly used readability formulas measure only two linguistic factors: vocabulary and syntactic complexity. And these two factors are not fully measured. For example, a means of controlling for the shift ing meanings and nuances of words, semantics, in changing settings has not yet been developed. Critics of readability formulas have had?and continue to have?a very easy time picking out the un measured after a readability formula has been applied. Indeed, at this stage, it is difficult to see how con tinued criticism of this sort can be considered a contribution, unless it serves as a preliminary for present ing a better approach to measuring one or more of the factors involved in assessing readability. Our purpose, therefore, in high lighting problems inherent in the syntactic measure as it is commonly used in readability formulas is simply to help clarify our reasoning for attempting a new approach to the measurement of syntactic com plexity. As Strickland noted (1962), shortened sentence length appeared to be the only consistent syntactic control used in the basal readers analyzed. Her finding could be antic ipated from the fact that sentence length, as measured by the number of words used, is the only syntactic