To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 40 high school and 20 college students on the readability of two pairs of paragraphs. The second experiment involved five-minute timed typing tests of pairs of paragraphs. Subjects participating in this second experiment were 14 beginning typing students, 18 students with 36 weeks of typing instruction, and 12 secretarial students with 36 weeks of typing instruction. The data from these experiments strongly supported the hypothesis. The students in the first experiment tended to choose paragraphs with identical or related topics, and the typists tended to make fewer errors while typing at a faster rate using the paragraph with identical or related topics. (RL)