Ed,
I'm not sure what research has been done recently on
readability formulas, but you should certainly look at
_Linguistic Complexity and Text Comprehension:
Readability Issues Reconsidered_ edited by Alice
Davison and Georgia Green, published by Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates in 1988. This book has several
articles questioning readability formulas,
particularly the simplistic ones. For example, a
popular formula is the Dale-Chall which is calculated
as follows:
Reading grade = .16 (% uncommon words) + .05 (average
number of words per sentence)
Another is the FOG index:
Reading grade = .4 (average sentence length + % words
of more than two syllables)
(Both of these are found in the article by Bruce and
Rubin in the above text on p. 6.)
One of the most popular readability formulas is the
Flesch or the Flesch-Kincaid, which I believe is used
in Microsoft Word (go to Tools, then Grammar, and
after running the grammar check a window will appear
with the statistics of the text, one line of which
will be the "readability" which is given in grade
levels).
Some of the criticisms against these formulas are that
they do not consider the variables that really make
texts difficult to read, such as syntactic complexity,
cohesion, background knowledge, number of inferences
required, idea complexity, dialectal variety, as well
as reader interest, for example.
My own doctoral research revealed that information
structure is another factor in the readability of a
text - texts that violate the given-new principle are
more difficult to read.
Hope this helps.
-Helene
Ed Keer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I hope this question is not too off topic. I am
> working as an editor in a marketing department and
> as
> part of their style some communications must be
> written at a 6th grade reading level. What they
> mean
> by this is that they should be fairly simple.
> Unfortunately they do not define what they mean by
> 6th
> grade level. Since I have a background in
> linguistics, I volunteeered to try to come up with
> some substantive guidelines for what is a 6th grade
> reading level. Can anyone point me to relevant
> references that address issues of reading difficulty
> or levels or even make some suggestions about what
> guidelines I can reccomend?
>
>
> Ed Keer
>
>
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