Keeping the content of two paragraphs identical, the author varied their forms using the Functional Sentence Perspectivists' Rule (FSPR) for relating old and new information within the sentences. In subjective readability decisions, a significant number of 272 high school subjects found the rule-governed paragraph more readable than the variant.…

Excerpts from articles in the "British Medical Journal" and "The American Journal of Medicine" were compared to determine which journal was easier to read and what stylistic traits might account for such ease. Nine paragraphs from the discussion sections of articles on hypertension were taken from each of the journals. When…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

Reports of research on using different patterns for connecting sentences. Shows the importance of applying insights from text linguistics to writing instruction. (RL)

To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective…