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Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. The concept exists in both in natural language and programming languages though in different forms. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content (the complexity of its vocabulary and syntax) and its presentation (such as typographic aspects that affect legibility, like font size, line height, character spacing, and line length). In programming, things such as programmer comments, choice of loop structure, and choice of names can determine the ease with which humans can read computer program code.

Higher readability in a text eases reading effort and speed for the general population of readers. For those who do not have high reading comprehension, readability is necessary for understanding and applying a given text. Techniques to simplify readability are essential to communicate a set of information to the intended audience. Whether it is code, news information, or storytelling, every writer has a target audience that they have to adjust their readability levels to.

Definition

Different definitions of readability exist from various sources. The term "readability" is inherently broad and can become confusing when examining all of the possible definitions. Readability is a concept that involves audience, content, quality, legibility, and can even involve the formatting and design of any given information. Therefore, the definition can fluctuate based on the type of audience to whom one is presenting a certain type of content to. For example, a technical writer might focus on clear and concise language and formatting that allows easy-reading. In contrast, a scholarly journal would use sophisticated writing that would appeal and make sense to the type of audience to whom they are directing information to.

Applications

Readability is essential to the clarity and accessibility of texts used in classrooms, work environments, and every day life. The government prioritizes readability as well through Plain Language Laws which enforces important documents to be written at an 8th grade level.

Much research has focused on matching prose to reading skill, resulting in formulas for use in research, government, teaching, publishing, the military, medicine, and business.

Readability and Newspaper Readership

Several studies in the 1940s showed that even small increases in readability greatly increases readership in large-circulation newspapers.

In 1947, Donald Murphy of Wallace's Farmer used a split-run edition to study the effects of making text easier to read. He found that reducing from the 9th to the 6th-grade reading level increased readership by 43% for an article about 'nylon'. He also found a 60% increase in readership for an article on corn, with better responses from people under 35.The result was a gain of 42,000 readers in a circulation of 275,000.

Wilber Schramm interviewed 1,050 newspaper readers. He found that an easier reading style helps to determine how much of an article is read. This was called reading persistence, depth, or perseverance. He also found that people will read less of long articles than of short ones, for example, a story nine paragraphs long will lose 3 out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph. In contrast, a shorter story will lose only 2 out of 10 readers.

A study in 1947 by Melvin Lostutter showed that newspapers were generally written at a level five years above the ability of average American adult readers. The reading ease of newspaper articles was not found to have much connection with the education, experience, or personal interest of the journalists writing the stories. It instead had more to do with the convention and culture of the industry. Lostutter argued for more readability testing in newspaper writing. Improved readability must be a "conscious process somewhat independent of the education and experience of the staffs writers."

In 1948, Bernard Feld did a study of every item and ad in the Birmingham News of 20 November 1947. He divided the items into those above the 8th-grade level and those at the 8th grade or below. He chose the 8th-grade breakpoint, as that was determined to be the average reading level of adult readers. An 8th-grade text "...will reach about 50% of all American grown-ups," he wrote. Among the wire-service stories, the lower group got two-thirds more readers, and among local stories, 75% more readers. Feld also believed in drilling writers in Flesch's clear-writing principles.

Both Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning worked extensively with newspapers and the wire services in improving readability. Mainly through their efforts in a few years, the readability of US newspapers went from the 16th to the 11th-grade level, where it remains today.

The two publications with the largest circulations, TV Guide (13 million) and Reader's Digest (12 million), are written at the 9th-grade level. The most popular novels are written at the 7th-grade level. This supports the fact that the average adult reads at the 9th-grade level. It also shows that, for recreation, people read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level.

Early Research

In the 1880s, English professor L. A. Sherman found that the English sentence was getting shorter. In Elizabethan times, the average sentence was 50 words long while in Sherman's modern time, it was 23 words long.

Sherman's work established that:

• Literature is a subject for statistical analysis.
• Shorter sentences and concrete terms help people to make sense of what is written.
• Speech is easier to understand than text.
• Over time, text becomes easier if it is more like speech.

Sherman wrote: "Literary English, in short, will follow the forms of standard spoken English from which it comes. No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk.... The oral sentence is clearest because it is the product of millions of daily efforts to be clear and strong. It represents the work of the race for thousands of years in perfecting an effective instrument of communication."

In 1889 in Russia, the writer Nikolai A. Rubakin published a study of over 10,000 texts written by everyday people. From these texts, he took 1,500 words he thought most people understood. He found that the main blocks to comprehension are unfamiliar words and long sentences. Starting with his own journal at the age of 13, Rubakin published many articles and books on science and many subjects for the great numbers of new readers throughout Russia. In Rubakin's view, the people were not fools. They were simply poor and in need of cheap books, written at a level they could grasp.

In 1921, Harry D. Kitson published The Mind of the Buyer, one of the first books to apply psychology to marketing. Kitson's work showed that each type of reader bought and read their own type of text. On reading two newspapers and two magazines, he found that short sentence length and short word length were the best contributors to reading ease.