The Principles of Readability gives a brief introduction to the literacy studies in the U.S. and the research on readability and the readability formulas.

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The Principles of Readability.

Adequate functional literacy skills positively influence individuals' ability to take control of their health. Print and Web-based cancer information is often written at difficult reading levels. This systematic review evaluates readability instruments (FRE, F-K, Fog, SMOG, Fry) used to assess print and Web-based cancer information and word recognition and comprehension tests (Cloze, REALM, TOFHLA, WRAT) that measure people's health literacy. Articles on readability and comprehension instruments explicitly used for cancer information were assembled by searching MEDLINE and Psyc INFO from 1993 to 2003. In all, 23 studies were included; 16 on readability, 6 on comprehension, and 1 on readability and comprehension. Of the readability investigations, 14 focused on print materials, and 2 assessed Internet information. Comprehension and word recognition measures were not applied to Web-based information. None of the formulas were designed to determine the effects of visuals or design factors that could influence readability and comprehension of cancer education information.

A Systematic Review of Readability and Comprehension Instruments Used for Print and Web-Based Cancer Information

https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa29584/Download/0029584-15082016211834.pdf

Predicting the “helpfulness” of online consumer reviews

This study addresses the need in discourse psychology for computational techniques that analyze text on multiple levels of cohesion and text difficulty. Discourse psychologists often investigate phenomena related to discourse processing using lengthy texts containing multiple paragraphs, as opposed to single word and sentence stimuli. Characterizing such texts in terms of cohesion and coherence is challenging. Some computational tools are available, but they are either fragmented over different databases or they assess single, specific features of text. Coh-Metrix is a computational linguistic tool that measures text cohesion and text difficulty on a range of word, sentence, paragraph, and discourse dimensions. This study investigated the validity of Coh-Metrix as a measure of cohesion in text using stimuli from published discourse psychology studies as a benchmark. Results showed that Coh-Metrix indexes of cohesion (individually and combined) significantly distinguished the high- versus low-cohesion vers...

Coh-Metrix: Capturing Linguistic Features of Cohesion

/pdf/computational-assessment-of-text-readability-a-survey-of-tfar6968mt.pdf

Computational Assessment of Text Readability: A Survey of Current and Future Research Running title: Computational Assessment of Text Readability

The concept of readability

An examination of measures of readability

Fast Track is the story of the rise and fall of U.S. leadership in international trade. Fast Track authority is the process Congress devised to approve trade agreements, giving Congress input into negotiations in exchange for a timely up-or-down vote. Foes derided it as a procedural gimmick, but it helped forge a bipartisan consensus on trade policy. Despite its successes, it was also fragile. The bipartisan consensus has since frayed and Fast Track has lapsed, allowing other countries to fill the void. This book discusses how Fast Track worked and offers a path for rebuilding consensus in favor of its renewal. 

Jack Gilliland

Papers

The concept of readability

An examination of measures of readability

Fast Track