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A FORMULA FOR PREDICTING READABILITY
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0
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1948
Year
Unknown Venue
Literary MagazinesPsycholinguisticsMedia StudiesJournalismInteractive JournalismNatural Language ProcessingReading ComprehensionLanguage TestingComputational LinguisticsInterpretabilityLanguage StudiesContent AnalysisWall Street JournalEditorial IndependenceReadability FormulaLanguage ComprehensionArtsMass CommunicationLexical Complexity PredictionLinguistics
An advertisement in a literary magazine announced that Robert P. Gunning had awarded the Wall Street Journal a readability honor, claiming its front page was the most readable in the country. The paper investigates whether Gunning’s conclusion was based on empirical reader testing or on another method. Gunning employed a standard readability formula as a shortcut.
EVERAL months ago editor of Wall Street Journal ran a full-page advertisement in one of leading literary magazines, announcing two honors recently awarded to it. One of these honors was a statement made by Robert P. Gunning that Wall Street Journal had the readable front page in country. How did Mr. Gunning come to this conclusion? Did he actually sample a cross section of readers, have them read front pages of leading newspapers, and then compare their ability to read and understand various front pages? No. He used an accepted short cut. He predicted reading difficulty of various front pages by using a readability formula and found that Wall Street Journal was most readable.