Higher readability in a text eases reading effort and speed for the general population of readers.
In contrast, a scholarly journal would use sophisticated writing that would appeal and make sense to the type of audience to whom they are directing information.
The government prioritizes readability as well through Plain Language Laws which enforces important documents to be written at an 8th grade level.
[12] Starting with his own journal at the age of 13, Rubakin published many articles and books on science and many subjects for the great numbers of new readers throughout Russia.
In the 1920s, the scientific movement in education looked for tests to measure students' achievement to aid in curriculum development.
[20][21][22][23][24] In 1934, educational psychologist Edward Thorndike of Columbia University noted that, in Russia and Germany, teachers used word frequency counts to match books to students.
[31] Also in 1934, Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale published the first adult reading ease formula based on passages on health topics from a variety of textbooks and magazines.
They wrote, "For them, the enriching values of reading are denied unless materials reflecting adult interests are adapted to their needs."
The poorest readers, one-sixth of the adult population, need "simpler materials for use in promoting functioning literacy and in establishing fundamental reading habits.
"[33] In 1939, Irving Lorge published an article that reported other combinations of variables that indicate difficulty more accurately than the ones Gray and Leary used.
[36] In 1947, Donald Murphy of Wallace's Farmer used a split-run[37] edition to study the effects of making text easier to read.
Wilber Schramm, who directed the Communications Research program at the University of Illinois interviewed 1,050 newspaper readers in 1947.
[38] A study in 1947 by Melvin Lostutter showed that newspapers were generally written at a level five years above the ability of average American adult readers.
The reading ease of newspaper articles was not found to have much connection with the education, experience, or personal interest of the journalists writing the stories.
[41] Both Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning worked extensively with newspapers and the wire services in improving readability.
In 1944, he founded the first readability consulting firm dedicated to reducing the "fog" in newspapers and business writing.
In 1952, he published The Technique of Clear Writing with his own Fog Index, a formula that correlates 0.91 with comprehension as measured by reading tests.
[8] Edgar Dale, a professor of education at Ohio State University, was one of the first critics of Thorndike's vocabulary-frequency lists.
In 1978, John Bormuth of the University of Chicago looked at reading ease using the new Cloze deletion test developed by Wilson Taylor.
The best level for classroom "assisted reading" is a slightly difficult text that causes a "set to learn", and for which readers can correctly answer 50% of the questions of a multiple-choice test.
One of the most well known was the Mean Cloze Formula, which was used in 1981 to produce the Degree of Reading Power system used by the College Entrance Examination Board.
[53][54][55] In 1988, Jack Stenner and his associates at MetaMetrics, Inc. published the Lexile Framework for assessing readability and matching students with appropriate texts.
[citation needed] In 2000, researchers of the School Renaissance Institute and Touchstone Applied Science Associates published their Advantage-TASA Open Standard (ATOS) Reading ease Formula for Books.
Because of the limits of the reading ease formulas, some research looked at ways to measure the content, organization, and coherence of text.
[61] R. C. Calfee and R. Curley built on Bonnie Meyer's work and found that an unfamiliar underlying structure can make even simple text hard to read.
They brought in a graded system to help students progress from simpler story lines to more advanced and abstract ones.
[87] The cognitively-motivated features were originally designed for adults with intellectual disability, but was proved to improve readability assessment accuracy in general.
Cognitively-motivated features, in combination with a logistic regression model, can correct the average error of Flesch–Kincaid grade-level by more than 70%.
The newly discovered features by Feng include: In 2012, Sowmya Vajjala at the University of Tübingen created the WeeBit corpus by combining educational articles from the Weekly Reader website and BBC Bitesize website, which provide texts for different age groups.
[9] Even though the traditional features like the average sentence length have high correlation with reading difficulty, the measure of readability is much more complex.