A look at the problem of readability of written text, based upon the judgments of 56 professional writers on five passages of text taken from a reading test. (Author/HB)

Reviews formulas and related predictive devices that tell whether a particular piece of writing is likely to be readable to a particular group of readers. (RB)

Two studies investigated the relationships between readability, prior knowledge, and interest in the material being read. In the first study, 169 college freshmen read cloze passages of materials from the Nelson-Denny Reading Tests, then one week later read the whole passages and completed the related multiple choice questions. A control group…

The variables used in most readability formulas consist of counts of language elements which highly relate to comprehension scores on passages of a wide range of difficulty. The variables most often used are some measure of word difficulty and yield an index score representing the style difficulty of the passages to which they are applied…

Identifies and describes major factors interacting with readability measures in 36 experimental studies analyzing the validity of such measures. (RB)

Three correlation matrices of readability variables were factor analyzed and the results compared to factor analyses of earlier matrices and to each other. (HOD)

Writing, editing, and printing texts for schools has been the accepted role of publishers, while text researchers have concentrated on typography, content, and readability. The hundreds of readability formulas now available make readability the most sophisticated of these three areas. Research in reading comprehension suggests that publishers…

One of the ways to handle the increasing demands on readers' skills is to make writing more readable. The problem has two different aspects: predicting how readable writing will be to a reader, and producing writing that is readable to that reader. Prediction is relatively simple, and can be done statistically with readability formulas. Production…

Seven passages of a published reading comprehension test were administered to college students to compare the regular multiple choice test scores with scores on two forms of a cloze test and with readability formula values. (HOD)

Project CREATES stands for Combined Resources for Editing Automated Teaching to Enlighten Students, the Harvard University Computer-Aided Instruction Laboratory's part of "A Multi-Agency Developmental Adult Basic Education Program." The major emphases of Project CREATES have been in the area of program and procedure development for…