Readability in a nutshell...

A Monday morning and I was feeling the Monday morning blues. To top it, I had to give a project presentation. Well, now I’m glad I had the presentation as I realized I need to gather my scattered thoughts on my project topic and yes, market the product in a better and more impressive way, even when bombarded with questions!! :P

Working in this direction, I decided to blog about the ideas and concepts about Readability Assessment by putting it in a nutshell…

So... Why are we looking at readability?

The use of readability test has been a controversial topic. There is a lot of apprehension associated and quite a few questions are raised about this topic. Firstly, let’s be clear with “What readability actually is”. Readability describes the ease with which a document can be read and make sense of it. To help us assess how “readable” a text is, we use readability tests.

These tests were developed with the intention of helping librarians and educators select their choice of books, who were otherwise relying on recommendations to make decisions.

Though Webster’s defines “readable” as something that is fit to read, interesting, attractive in style and enjoyable; obviously, the readability formulas cannot measure the latter three factors. Also the comprehensibility or how well the user understands the text cannot be measured using these formulas.

Historical Overview

Readability formulas were first developed in the 1920s in the United States. Right from the time of conception till today, readability tests have been designed as mathematical equations which take into account elements of writing such as- the number of personal pronouns in the text, the average number of syllables in words or number of words in sentences in the text.

Factors like these are usually described as "semantic" if they concern the word used and "syntactic" if they concern the length or structure of sentences. Both semantic and syntactic elements are surface-level features of the text, and do not take into account any the nature of the topic or the characteristics of the readers.

The earliest investigations of readability were conducted by asking students, librarians, and teachers what seemed to make texts readable.

How Do They Work?

Readability formulas measure certain features of text which can be subjected to mathematical equations and calculations. These mathematical equations cannot measure comprehension directly and not all features can be measured mathematically. Readers can be questioned or tested on the material they have read and the material itself can be tested with formulas. The readers success in understanding the material can be correlated to the readability score of the text itself. This is one method to validate the formulae.

The most important features that contribute to determining reading ease are word and sentence length.

So readability formulas are considered to be predictions of reading ease but they do not help us evaluate how well the reader will understand the ideas in the text.

Today’s readability formulas are usually based on one semantic factor ( difficulty of words) and one syntactic factor (difficulty of sentences ). Inclusion of other factors just complicates the process and doesn’t make the formula anymore predictive! Words are either measured against a frequency list or are measured according to their length in characters or syllables. Sentences are measured for the average length in characters or words.

The best readability methods and tests are elaborated on below :

· Fog Index

This is computed as follows:

1. The total number of words is divided by the total number of sentences which gives the average number of words per sentence.

2. The number of words with more than 3 syllables id divided by total number of words to give the percentage of difficult words

3. The sum of these two figures( 1 and 2) multiplied by 0.4. this is the Fog Index in years of education.

· The Flesch Reading Ease Scale is the most widely used formula outside of educational circles. It measures reading from 100 (for easy to read) to 0 (for very difficult to read). A zero score indicates text has more than 37 words on the average in each sentence and the average word is more than 2 syllables. In response to demand, Flesch also provided an interpretation table to convert the scale to estimated reading grade and estimated school grade completed.

· Fry published a readability graph which was easier than manual computations. A hand-held calculator was developed to do the Fry test, and now it is incorporated in computer programs.

· The “cloze” procedure

The cloze procedure for testing the writing is often treated as a readability test because a formula exists for translating the data from "cloze tests" into numerical results. The name "Cloze" comes from the word "closure". In this procedure, words are deleted from the text and readers are asked to fill in the blanks. By constructing the meaning from the available words and completing the text, the reader achieves “closure”.It became a popular method for measuring the suitability of text for a particular audience. It was popular because its scoring was objective; it was easy to use and analyze; it used the text itself for analysis; and it yields high correlations to other formulas.

It tells you whether a particular audience group can comprehend the writing well enough to complete the cloze test and asks the reader to fill in the appropriate or a similar word in the blanks. Usually every fifth word is deleted. Cloze is thought to offer a better index of comprehensibility than the statistical formulas. The ability to identify the missing word or to insert a satisfactory substitute for the original word indicates that the reader comprehends the content of the text.

In recent years, researchers have emphasized that readability tests can only measure the surface characteristics of text. Qualitative factors like vocabulary difficulty, composition, sentence structure, concreteness and abstractness, obscurity and incoherence cannot be measured mathematically. They have pointed out that material which receives a low-grade level score may be incomprehensible to the target audience. As an example, they suggest that you consider what happens if you scramble the words in a sentence, or on a larger scale, randomly rearranged the sentences in a whole text. The readability score could be low, but comprehension would be lacking.

example: Fall Humpty had Dumpty great a.

Things readability formulas can do

1. Their primary advantage is they can serve as an early warning system to let the writer know that the writing is too dense. They can give a quick, on-the-spot assessment. They have been described as "screening devices" to eliminate dense drafts and give rise to revisions or substitutions.

2. In some organizational settings, readability tests are considered useful to show measurable improvement in written documents.

Things they cannot tell you

1. How complex the ideas are

2. Whether or not the content is in logical order

3. Whether the vocabulary is appropriate for the audience

4. Whether there is a gender, class or cultural bias

5. Whether the design is attractive and helps or hinders the reader

6. Whether the material appears in a form and type style that is easy or hard to read

Readability tests cannot tell you whether the information in the text is written in a way to interest the reader, nor can they tell you whether reader has sufficient background information to appreciate the new information provided in the text.

Hope this blog helped in providing a broad overview about readability :) And assessors, hope this provides a clearer picture and we can think and work further with new ideas :)