Vicissitudes in Appraising Reading Difficulty Chuck Schultz Writing difficult sentences was once seen as a mark of advanced learning. Now, it is more likely seen as insensitivity to the reader. To the test developer, it is seen as bias. Tests should ve written to measure content unencumbered with reading difficulty. Many indexes or reading difficulty have arisen to help the writer simplify understanding.
Lucid writing is less likely to contain long words and complex sentences.
Several factors account for this. Abstractions are more likely to be expressed in long words than are concrete concepts and abstractions are harder to understand. The most familiar words tend to be shorter. Readers are likely to loose their train of thought in complex sentences. It is not surprising that simple indexes based on word length and sentence length are related to reading difficulty.