27.4553, Review: Ling & Lit: Psycholing; Socioling: Bailin, Grafstein (2015)

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Subject: 27.4553, Review: Ling & Lit: Psycholing; Socioling: Bailin, Grafstein (2015)

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Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2016 14:50:13
From: Mario Bisiada [mbisiada at fastmail.fm]
Subject: Readability: Text and Context

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36164197


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-5132.html

AUTHOR: Alan  Bailin
AUTHOR: Ann  Grafstein
TITLE: Readability: Text and Context
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Mario Bisiada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

According to Alan Bailin and Ann Grafstein, the book “Readability: Text and
Context” ''examine[s] a wide range of evidence pointing to factors that have
an effect on readability'' (p. ix). It is aimed to serve as a ''guidance to
writers and educators'' (p. ix) and as a ''one-stop resource for both scholars
and practitioners'' (p. 1). It also aims to be an ''attempt to begin to
establish a direction for a unified study of readability'' (p. ix). I will
argue in this review that it does provide an overview of existing readability
studies, but that its criticism somewhat narrowly focuses on readability
formulas while ignoring existing non-formulaic proposals and lacking the
theoretical depth and cross-linguistic rigour to really provide an
interdisciplinary approach to the notion of readability.

In writing this book, which is based on an article by the authors (Bailin and
Grafstein 2001), Bailin and Grafstein have ''hoped and assumed that the reader
of this book will come from a diverse range of disciplines'' (p. 4) and that
the book ''will be accessible to anyone with a professional interest in the
principles of effective written communication'' (p. 4). The authors further
say that they have ''tried to ensure throughout that the arguments we make
will be clear even for those who cannot or do not wish to follow the more
technical details'' (p. 4).

The book is divided into six chapters. In the first, introductory chapter, the
authors outline the basic concepts of their monograph. They suggest three
basic concepts related to textual comprehension: linking of information units,
ambiguity and background knowledge (p. 5). The chapter argues that claims
about readability can be supported by whatever type of evidence is available,
but that empirical approaches should always be supported by a sound
theoretical approach.

The second chapter ''Readability Formulas'' provides a historical account and
criticism of readability formulas. The authors argue that there is a focus
change in Western rhetoric from argumentation to communication, and trace the
study of readability to classical rhetoric.

Chapter 3, ''Grammar and Readability'', analyses the effect of grammatical
complexity, ambiguity and linking of information, which are central notions in
the authors' approach to readability. Chapter 4, entitled ''Meaning in Words
and Sentences'', then focuses on semantic aspects of readability, especially
issues of background knowledge in understanding a text and semantic ambiguity.

Chapter 5 focuses on ''Coherence and Discourse'' properties of texts and their
effect on readability, where, in addition to a further discussion of
conceptual linking and background knowledge, the authors discuss the effect of
frames and metaphors on readability.

The final chapter, entitled ''Towards a Theory of Readability'', summarises
the arguments made in the book and outlines the aspects that the authors
consider to have an impact on readability.

EVALUATION

The study of readability is here defined as ''an inquiry into what properties
of texts help or hinder communication''. The authors do not separately
introduce the term ''comprehensibility'' and seem to make no such distinction;
elsewhere, they use the term interchangeably with readability (''[we] examine
the properties of texts and their contexts in order to identify factors that
affect comprehensibility and ease of reading'', p. 63). As the term
''comprehensibility'' is often used (see, e.g. Charrow 1988; Maksymski et al.
2015), it would have been useful for the authors to at least state that they
do not differentiate between readability and comprehensibility.

The title of Chapter 1 announces a ''new approach to readability''. However,
while the authors make a good case for the value of the synthesis conducted in
their book, it is not entirely clear what is ''new'' about their approach. One
suspects it may be the understanding of readability through the concepts of
linking, ambiguity and background knowledge, but the authors do not make this
clear. At least in the introductory chapter, a little more orientation towards
the academic discipline would have benefitted the authors' aim of establishing
a unified theory of readability considerably.

The authors make the argument that what are usually called complex sentences
may be ''easier to understand than simpler sentences because they make the
relationships between clauses explicit'' (p. 55), which is a welcome view
given the usual stance to avoid long and complex sentences in most style
guides and writing manuals (see also the discussion in Bisiada (2014: 19-20)).
It is commendable that real-life examples from a wide variety of text types
and registers are used to support artificially designed sentences to
illustrate and analyse a particular issue. A further positive aspect about
this book are the summaries that are presented at the end of each chapter and
that repeat the main points and arguments of each chapter in a concise form.

The authors present some interesting evidence that revising texts according to
readability formulas may not make them easier to understand. Chapter 4 also
has some well-argued criticisms of issues connecting readability to the
lexicon, such as word lists and assumptions about vocabulary size of
individual readers, where the authors argue that ''the use of word lists
assumes a level of homogeneity among the speakers of a language that does not
exist'' (p. 128). However, in general, the criticism of readability formulas
in this book is not particularly original. For instance, Bruce et al (1981)
already criticised the neglect of cognitive aspects by readability formulas
and pointed out that formulas ''cannot correctly predict how a particular
reader will interact with a particular book'' (1981: 1).

A major shortcoming of the present book, however, is the lack of engagement
with already existing, more refined models of readability. The authors
criticise at length and in some detail classic accounts and ad-hoc approaches
to readability from the 1920s (15-25), whose claim to scientific validity is
at least outdated. It is questionable whether these approaches still receive
academic attention and really need to be attacked in this detail. That is
especially questionable as more complex and sophisticated theories that
already go beyond a formulaic approach are ignored.

It is especially striking that the authors state that their ''unified account
of the factors in text and context that contribute to readability'' is a mere
beginning and invitation to further research (p. 64), when such research has
been conducted for several decades. At no point do the authors mention, for
instance, the Hamburg model of comprehensibility (''Hamburger
Verständlichkeitsmodell'', Langer et al. 1974), the extension of that model
proposed by Groeben and Christmann (1996) or the Karlsruhe Comprehensibility
Concept (Göpferich 2001, 2009), all of which go beyond readability formulas
and are based on judging dimensions of comprehensibility such as semantic
redundancy, stylistic simplicity and personalisation.

Do the authors not mention those models because they appear under the term
''comprehensibility'' rather than ''readability'', or just because they
originate in Europe rather than America? The book generally seems to focus on
English, though the authors at no point state any such focus: they merely talk
about ''texts'', ''writers'' and ''well-known readability formulas'' (p. 7).
Those readability formulas only include formulas devised for English, and the
authors do not, for instance, mention the Wiener Sachtextformeln (Bamberger
and Vanecek 1984) or LIX (Björnsson 1968), though those formulas could have
been subjected to the same criticism the authors have for other readability
formulas. A more international, cross-linguistic perspective would have done
well to support the inclusive aim of the book.

In some cases, there exist notions and research that would have been relevant
to the authors' discussion but that they do not invoke. The discussion of
syntactic complexity in Chapter 3 strangely ignores Dahl's (2004) major work
in this area, which already established much of what is argued for at length
here. The section on metaphor in Chapter 5 does not mention grammatical
metaphor. It would have been interesting to read a discussion of the effect of
grammatical metaphor on readability, which has attracted some research
recently (see, for instance, Lassen 2003).

One central factor that the authors repeatedly point out as impeding
readability is ''the difficulty of linking syntactic material [...] due to
intervening material'' (p. 75-79, also pp. 93, 192). The discussion of
examples from English and French here is certainly valid and accurate, but the
authors do not problematise the fact that in some languages, the presence of
''intervening material'' represents the normal information structure, for
example in German, which has the verbal bracket (''Satzklammer''). In that
language, intervening material of the kind discussed here (p. 79) between the
subject and the main verb is common to every subordinate clause, and there is
no evidence that this may be a readability or comprehensibility problem for
speakers (Thurmair 1991; Marschall 1994; Wegener 2007; Bisiada 2013: 49).
Indeed, when Hans-Dietrich Genscher famously told the citizens of the GDR that
''Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre
Ausreise...'' ['We have come to you to tell you that your departure...'],
people did not need to wait for the main verb at the end of that subordinate
clause to understand the message and drown out the rest of the sentence.

The authors are right that the examples they provide are ''intuitively
difficult to read'', but perhaps this is a language-dependent rather than a
psycholinguistic issue. I would argue that intervening material is a matter of
convention and that speakers develop ways of overcoming the time they have to
wait for the main verb by anticipating what is likely to be said. In general,
cross-linguistic perspectives are regrettably absent from the book. The
authors only seem to draw on other languages when this supports their
argument, but not to problematise any issues. That makes the book of little
use to scholars working with languages other than English and somewhat
restricts the wide circle of readers intended for this book.

Chapter 6 announces by its title a step towards a theory of readability, but I
have trouble seeing what the authors actually bring forth. There are some
summarising statements such as ''readability theory needs to examine the kinds
of gaps that exist between the non-textual information that a text requires
and the non-textual information that a reader brings to the text'' (p. 180).
Based on their definition of readability, which concerns aspects of written
texts that enhance or impede comprehension of fluency, they frame readability
theory within text theory rather than developmental psychology (p. 201).

Other than those points, the chapter consists to a large extent of a summary
of the book, and the authors mainly repeat the criticism of readability
formulas that is already found earlier in the book. Given that there have long
been proposals going beyond the use of formulas (see above), the conclusion to
the book seems oddly out of date with current research on the issue. Much of
the rest of the chapter is a collection of questions, with the aim of inviting
further research in this area. Some of them, for instance the issue of genre
conventions, are currently being addressed. This final section of the chapter
would have benefitted from some pointers to such existing research.

The authors also tentatively propose a ''readability checker'' (p. 191) for
word processing software that would function similarly to a spellchecker. It
is somewhat startling that the authors, having argued extensively against the
use of word lists in Chapter 4 (''no single list of words can be used to
measure difficulty'', p. 128), end up suggesting to ''develop lists of words
which would likely be familiar to most readers within a particular
population'' (p. 191), which are then applied to a particular person or group
according to their demographic characteristics. Exactly how the use of several
lists is superior to the use of one list, and from what point or size onwards
a group of readers can be assumed to be sufficiently homogeneous to warrant
the use of a word list is unfortunately not explicated.

In terms of formal appearance, the book is well edited in terms of spelling,
but words are missing in various places in every chapter, which suggests that
proofreading has not been done very carefully or that the book has simply been
spellchecked rather than proofread.

In all, then, the book leaves the reader somewhat wanting given the promises
of a new approach to readability and the development of a theory of
readability. With a bit more effort cross-disciplinarily, especially as
regards the treatment of studies published under the header of
comprehensibility, and cross-linguistically, the book could have been a
significantly more valuable resource on readability than it is in its present
form.

REFERENCES

Bailin, Alan and Ann Grafstein. 2001. The linguistic assumptions underlying
readability formulae: A critique. Language & Communication 21(3). 285-301.

Bamberger, Richard and Erich Vanecek. 1984.
Lesen--Verstehen--Lernen--Schreiben. Wien: Jugend und Volk.

Bisiada, Mario. 2013. From hypotaxis to parataxis: An investigation of
English–German syntactic convergence in translation. University of Manchester
PhD thesis.

Bisiada, Mario. 2014. ''Lösen Sie Schachtelsätze möglichst auf'': The impact
of editorial guidelines on sentence splitting in German business article
translations. Applied Linguistics. Advance online access.
doi:10.1093/applin/amu035.

Björnsson, Carl-Hugo. 1968. Läsbarhet. Stockholm: Liber.

Bruce, Bertram C., Andee D. Rubin and Kathleen S. Starr. 1981. Why readability
formulas fail. Urbana: University of Illinois.

Charrow, Veda. 1988. Readability vs. comprehensibility: A case study in
improving a real document. In Alice Davison and Georgia M. Green (eds.)
Linguistic complexity and text comprehension: Readability issues reconsidered.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Dahl, Östen. 2004. The growth of maintenance and linguistic complexity.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Göpferich, Susanne. 2001. Von Hamburg nach Karlsruhe: ein
kommunikationsorientierter Bezugsrahmen zur Bewertung der Verständlichkeit von
Texten. Fachsprache 23(3-4). 117-138.

Göpferich, Susanne. 2009. Comprehensibility assessment using the Karlsruhe
Comprehensibility Concept. The Journal of Specialised Translation 11. 31-51.

Groeben, Norbert and Ursula Christmann. 1996. Textverstehen und
Textverständlichkeit aus sprach-/denkpsychologischer Sicht. In Wolfgang Börner
and Klaus Vogel (eds.) Texte im Fremdspracherwerb. Tübingen: Narr. 67-89.

Langer, Inghard, Friedemann Schulz von Thun and Reinhard Tausch. 1974.
Verständlichkeit in Schule, Verwaltung, Politik und Wissenschaft: Mit einem
Selbsttrainingsprogramm zur Verständlichen Gestaltung von Lehr- und
Informationstexten. München: Reinhardt.

Lassen, Inger. 2003. Accessibility and acceptability in technical manuals: A
survey of style and grammatical metaphor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Maksymski, Karin, Silke Gutermuth and Silvia Hansen-Schirra. 2015. Translation
and comprehensibility. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Marschall, Matthias. 1994. Satzklammer und Textverstehen im Rahmen der
kausativen Struktur: Zur Funktion der Verbendstellung im Deutschen. Deutsche
Sprache (22). 310-330.

Schriver, Karen A. 1989. Evaluating text quality: The continuum from
text-focused to reader-focused methods. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication 32(4). 238-255.

Thurmair, Maria. 1991. Warten auf das Verb: Die Gedächtnisrelevanz der
Verbklammer im Deutschen. Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (17). 174-202.

Wegener, Heide. 2007. Entwicklungen im heutigen Deutsch: Wird Deutsch
einfacher? Deutsche Sprache (35). 35-62.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mario Bisiada received his PhD in Intercultural and Translation Studies from
the University of Manchester. He is currently lecturer at the Universitat
Pompeu Fabra, where he is a member of the Grup d’Estudis del Discurs. His
research focusses on the corpus-based study of translated discourse, and he
has published on the effect of readability concerns on sentence splitting in
translation and translation as a locus of language contact. He is currently
working on a monograph on the effects of stylistic guidelines and readability
concerns on the editing of translated language.





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