Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

The use of readability formulas is spreading into the courts and legislatures as one objective measure to protect the basic rights of citizens. Court cases and legislation involving the readability of Federal Government forms and correspondence, materials concerning criminal rights, consumer product labeling, ballot measures, and warranties and…

A study investigated whether or not the global structure of a text influences its readability and how that influence might be related to the already recognized influences of vocabulary and sentence length. The subjects, 250 fourth-grade students in Quebec, each read four texts representing four different structures, four subjects, and two levels…

A study investigated whether informational graphics help attract the reader to a newspaper story, prolong reader interaction, and increase reader knowledge. Five versions of a small informational graphic and a related 10-inch non-lead story published on the bottom of a newspaper page were tested on 300 participants (a non-probability sample of…

A study investigated college students' reactions to a news story written in the traditional "inverted pyramid" format and the same story rearranged into a "mapped" format (where similar information is gathered under heads and subheads). Seventy students were given the story in either the "mapped" or the traditional…

A study compared six midwestern United States campus newspapers with their respective general circulation newspapers. A content analysis of these publications was designed to determine whether local news stories in daily student newspapers are as readable, interesting, and thorough as those found in general circulation daily newspapers. The daily…

Effects on comprehension of a text structure used primarily in science and mathematics to present principles and associated proofs were studied for 70 undergraduates in 3 experiments. Results suggest that the usual proof-first structure is more difficult than a principle-first structure and results in less complete text representation. (SLD)

For much of this century, text linguists have recognized that various tokens called "metadiscourse" may help explain how texts function. In linguistics, metadiscourse has a more concrete meaning than it typically does in composition: it refers to specific words, phrases, and clauses which are primarily intended to help the reader…

A study examined the relationship between text schemata and comprehension monitoring to determine elementary school children's detection and remediation of internal inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages. Data were elicited (through computerized experimental reading passages containing internal inconsistencies) from 87 students in…