Limitations of readability formulas in guiding adaptations of texts
Alice Louise Davison · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1980
Introduct ion General RemarksFor the last 30 or 40 years much attention has been paid to formulas that claim to measure readability.Their widespread use is bound to have an effect on the texts that are produced for children learning to read.In this paper we would like to consider the implications of using these formulas not just for measuring readability, but also as a guide to producing texts.The creators of the formulas and others have always warned against using the formulas as guides to production, because the correlation of infrequent vocabulary and long sentences to difficulty in reading is not the same as a causal relationship.Furthermore, it is in fact impossible to use these formulas literally as guides to writing because, provided that one wants to preserve content, the injunction to simplify vocabulary, perhaps by paraphrase, conflicts with the injunction to shorten sentences.But there is an inescapable temptation to use these formulas as a guide to writing, especially if the writer is under an obligation to produce materials at a specific readability level.Publishers of textbooks, for children as well as college students, have recently been eager to guarantee the reading levels of their product, and the issue of guaranteeing readability levels is coming to have wider application with the institution of the "Plain English" requirement for many legal and other documents and with new interest in accurate captioning for hearing impaired people.