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Geoff Hart, a fine editor, wrote, "There is currently no useful, widely
available tool for conducting automatic readability assessments." (Geoff
defined useful as "one that correlates strongly with how well and how easily
readers understand a text.) He offers this "proof":
>> Take any sentence and run it through a readability formula.
>> Now, randomly reorder the words in that sentence or even arrange them in
the
> >least-comprehensible order you can possibly create and run the readability
>> formula again. You'll get exactly the same readability result, even though
>> the second sentence is gibberish ...
Geoff is right, but that isn't what readability indexes measure. He can just
as easily "prove" that word-counting software fails by rearranging the words;
look, it's gibberish, but it's the same word count! Arguing similarly,
"height" as a measurement fail to convey the size of a basketball
player--Shaquille O'Neal is seven feet, two inches tall, but if he lost a
hundred pounds he'd be just as tall.
I suggest a thought experiment. Let us imagine that the writers in Geoff's
organization are asked to write to a grade level, and rebelliously write
their sentences in random order to bust the metric. Do you think Geoff, as he
edits their work, would notice?
Don't interpret this as a personal attack on Geoff; he would of course notice
instantly. My point is that metrics only measure what they measure. Some
metrics are very limited, but you can work with them if you understand their
limitations (or their domain).
As it turns out, readability indexes (at least the Flesh-Kincaid readability
index) *do* correlate strongly with how well and easily readers understand a
text. Within the rather narrow domain where the index applies, Flesh
validated his index, and it does a disservice to dismiss his work, as
Connatser claims to with his "informal Internet survey." I would not base any
judgment solely on readability, but neither would I dismiss it out of hand.
Further, while any measurement can be busted, measuring several independent
variables quickly corrals the rebellious soul and homes in on the true
attribute you want to measure. Two simple metrics, height and weight, really
do illuminate much of the reason for Shaq's success. The measurements need to
be independent. I might choose to count pages to measure productivity; you
might threaten to double-space your text to bust the metric. Yes, that would
work, but gee, don't you think I'd notice?
-- Steve
Steven Jong, Documentation Team Manager (Typo? What tpyo?)
Lightbridge, Inc., 67 South Bedford St., Burlington, MA 01803 USA mailto:jong -at- lightbridge -dot- com -dot- nospam 781.359.4902 [voice]
Home Sweet Homepage: http://hometown.aol.com/SteveFJong
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