According to Robert P. Gunning, the Wall Street Journal an award for having “the most readable front page in the country.” Gunning’s way of coming to this conclusion was simple, he had found the difficulty of other front pages by using a formula. After using this readability formula, he found that the Wall Street Journal was the “most readable.”
Until recently, the objective techniques used by journalist were mainly used in children books. These techniques, however, have been knows for about 25 years and have been written about in educational journals, doctoral dissertations, Masters’ theses, etc. One question that people are asking is, “What has caused people to start reusing these techniques?”
The war period has helped people to realize how important these techniques are. More people are having to fill out tax forms, buy war bonds and so on. These techniques for making articles more readably have made things so much easier.
There are a couple of different ways to determine the readability of an article. The Lorge formula was one of the first and easiest formulas to use. By using this, it only took a short time to predict the readability of an article and make it easier to read. This formula is used by counting the number of uncommon words, the average sentence length, and the number of prepositional phrases.
Rudolf Flesch produced another formula in 1943. With the use of correlation tables he showed that the Lorge formula failed to discriminate satisfaction between materials above the eighth grade level in difficulty. Average adults are usually around the eighth or ninth grade level, Flesch felt that there needed to be a better way of determining the difficulty readability. His formula provided three different techniques. The average sentence length, number of affixed morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, etc), and a relative number of personal references were his ways of determining readability. After using this formula while reading materials published by the National Tuberculosis Association, they formula was found adequate. But not everything was correct. The number of affixes came up different and was difficult to keep count of all of them and was very time consuming to keep counting. Flesch later dropped the count of abstract words in his formula.
The main objective to using the Dale List of 769 words was that it did not differentiate between the higher levels of difficulty. The second downfall to Flesch’s formula was the count of personal references. This is not reliable because in most readings, things we say are not abstract or general. In the article, American Psychologists by S.S. Stevens and Geraldine Stone reported that Flesch’s formula was not as accurate as people thought.
After viewing the downfalls to this formula, a more efficient way of predicting readability was found. The hypothesis was to find a larger word list instead of affixes, personal references don’t really add up to that much, and a shorter formula could be created to make this more efficient. After doing an experiment, it was found that certain words that scored higher in other formulas, weren’t really difficult words at all. After making several combinations of factors, there was a new and better two-factor formula. By using a factor of vocabulary load (number of words outside the Dale list of 3,000 words) and a factor of sentence structure, this was a good way of predicting readability.
After correcting the grade levels, it helped to interpret scores obtained by the formula. For adults, the corrected grade levels may be interpreted by the number of years of schooling required to read the material and understand it.
The article did not claim that the formula would be definitive. It is believed, however, that this is a short cut in judging the difficulty in material. This formula can also be an aid in simplifying text.
It is said that you must be cautious about “writing for a readability formula.” A formula is a statistical device and it means that longer sentences make comprehension more difficult. It states that a readers purpose in reading and interest and background must also be taken into consideration.
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9 comments:
After actually scoring my own readability in class, I'm not so sure that some of the methods of scoring are accurate. I noticed that the people in the class that obtained the highest score simply used the most syllables in the shortest amount of sentences. This does not necessarily mean their writing is at a higher level. It simply means they are wordier writers than others.
I agree a little bit with what Markie has said in her comment. It is true that after listening to a couple of the responses in class that a readability score was influenced heavily by longer sentences and words with more syllables. Writing a response to readability then would automatically jump the reading level because every time the author commented on the subject, readability, he/she would add 5 syllables to the response.
I think that readability needs to come from someplace else, something more than sentence structure and syllables. However, I do think that shorter sentences with simple words are easier for children to understand, but I don't think longer sentences with larger words make children unable to comprehend meaning.
If you guys hadn't noticed, I can be contrary. So when I hear of a formula for anything, my mind naturally jumps to exceptional cases. In the case of readability, I can't keep my mind off of the Japanese poetry tradition of Haiku and Tanka. These are form poems that are incredibly complex in their native tongue. Distilled jems. All things Oriental became highly consumptive (no, not with TB...the other definition...ability to be consumed)post WWII...and if we are victors can't we write a superior poem? Just compare Bassho with the dreck of American pop haiku circa mid century. Same readability because it has the same line count...the same syllable count...but the former could be the subject of a PhD dissertation while the latter is good for wrapping dead fish. And besides, a little stretching is good for us...what is the readability factor of Harry Potter?
The fact that longer sentences make for harder comprehension seems a bit silly. I can have a really long sentence but say the same thing in a shorter, clearer, and more crisp way. Sometimes longer sentences are too wordy and drag on. Having longer sentences should not make for a better readability score. Shorter sentences with more complex words, I feel, should have better scoring. I have always been told to get to the point, so I have always written that way. Usually there is no need for extra mumbo-jumbo, nonsense words (hehe).
Hello Lori, the link below (and the added quotation) tells you more about Harry Potter's reading level ;-)
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/reading_levels.htm
“A.R. reading levels have been recently changed; many books, both easier and harder, now appear around grade level 4 and 5, from Amelia Bedelia to Harry Potter to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the Redwall series; the points awarded for the book vary dramatically based on length and difficulty.”
Hayley, I liked the "extra mumbo-jumbo"... This is why one should discuss whether it makes sense to give students a page limit for essay writing - some just try to "fill the pages." If you don't have any more to say, then don't say it! Instead, we teachers force them to come up with some ENGFISH to fulfill the length requirements. What about the merit of being able to say what one has to say in a short, concise way? As the Germans say, "In der Kuerze liegt die Wuerze" = "There's spice in shortness."
Since I seem to be the example of how "readability doesn't work because of wordiness or being repetitive" (I was the highest scoring person that was asked to read my paragraph) I would like to point out I wrote readability 5 times, and I hope that everyone wrote the word at least once. So, that leaves me with 20 syllables - a reading level still within the 13th grade. Those that had a 14th and 15th reading level did not read their paragraphs, and I'm sorry now I put myself on the line.
I, like everyone else, think the exercise is inaccurate, but thanks again for using me as 'the poor example.'
I also think that the exercise is inaccurate, I also scored low on the readability exercise, but that does not mean that I'm a bad writer, I will not let a exercise like that tell me how well or bad I'm doing, its like taking a test and failing, you're not dumb because you failed the test, or keep failing tests, amybe your jsut not a good test taker. But there are test out there a "measure your intellegence", but I would not let a test tell me that I'm dumb.
I do not agree that longer sentences make the readability more difficult. You can use more adjectives to describe the subject and this would make the sentence longer but not harder to understand. If you consider the length of the words in the sentence that might make the sentence harder because those words would be harder for the child to sound out and read. Chances are that they also would not know the meaning. But rambling on and on in a sentence does not, in my opinion, make the sentence more difficult.
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