Readability formulas in the new millennium: what's the use?

ABSTRACT

While readability formulas were intended as a quick benchmark for indexing readabilty, they are inherently unreliable: they depend on criterion (calibration) passages too short to reflect cohesiveness, too varied to support between-formula comparisons, and too text-oriented to account for the effects of lists, enumerated sequences,and tables on text comprehension. But readability formulas did spark decades of research on what comprehension really involoves.

REFERENCES

• 1: Davison, A. (1984). Readability--Appraising text difficulty. In R. C. Anderson, J. Osborn, and R. J. Tierney (eds.), Learning to read in American schools: Basal readers and content texts (pp. 121-151). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• 2: Duffy, T. M. and Kabance, P. (1982). Testing a readable approach to text revision. Journal of Educational Psychology. 74, 733-748.
• 3: Duffy, T. M. (1985). Readability formulas: What's the use? In T. M. Dully and R. Waller (eds.), Designing usable texts (pp. 113-143). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
• 4: Harrison, C. (1980). Readability in the classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• 5: Klare, George R. (1984). Readability. In P. D Pearson, R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, and P. Mosenthal (eds.). Handbook odCreading research (pp. 681-744). NY: Longman.
• 6: Rothkopf, Ernest Z. (1985). Writing to teach and reading to learn: A perspective on the psychology of written instruction. In H. Singer and R. B. Ruddell (eds.), Theoretical models and processes odCreading, 3~J ed. (pp. 879-907). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
• 7: Schriver, K. A. (1989). Evaluating the quality of text: The continuum from text-focused to reader-focused methods. IF, JEff Transactions in Professional Communication, 32 (4), 238-255.
• 8: Karen A. Schriver, Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1997
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture
          Subjects: Document analysis

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Documentation

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture
          Subjects: Document analysis

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Human Factors, Performance, Reliability, Theory

Keywords:
criterion passages, reliability, validity