Discusses why proper nouns should be counted and how to count syllables and words, recent work on the validity of readability formulas, and the readability graph extrapolated to college level. (JM)

Discusses the meaning of readability, and describes several popular methods of assessing it. Gives the results of the application of one particular method to a selection of elementary astronomy and physics texts. (Author/GA)

Readability has been gauged by such means as determining the length of individual words in a passage, analyzing types of sentences, and assessing numbers of subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, modifiers, and so on. Probably the most successful formula has been the Dale-Chall method, which measures readability by determining the percentage…

The study reported in this paper was designed to describe the differences between the reading-difficulty levels of primary textbooks used in first-semester freshman general studies courses and the reading skills of the students enrolled in those courses, and to compare the Flesch Reading Ease Formula with the SMOG Grading Formula. Separate…