Readability
Subtitle: Text and Context
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2016
Format: Harcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781349570553
Table of contents: title: xiii
label: Preface; title: x
label: About the Authors; title: 1
label: 1. Introduction to a New Approach to Readability; title: 2
label: Evidence; title: 2
label: Some Basic Concepts; title: 4
label: Linking; title: 5
label: Ambiguity; title: 6
label: Contextual (background) knowledge; title: 7
label: The chapters: an outline; title: 10
label: 2. Readability Formulas; title: 10
label: Historical background; title: 15
label: Early attempts to measure readability; title: 15
label: Thorndike: the precursor; title: 18
label: Lively and Pressey: "A Method for Measuring 'Vocabulary Burden'"; title: 20
label: Vogel and Washburne: "An objective method"; title: 25
label: Adults' reading material; title: 26
label: Dale and Tyler: adults with limited reading ability; title: 29
label: Gray and Leary: what makes a book readable; title: 33
label: Lorge and benchmarks; title: 34
label: Classic readability formulas; title: 35
label: Flesch and readable style; title: 39
label: The Dale-Chall formulas; title: 41
label: Gunning Fog; title: 42
label: Fry's Readability Graph; title: 55
label: McLaughlin SMOG; title: 46
label: Other approaches to readability; title: 46
label: The cloze procedure; title: 48
label: Coh-Metrix; title: 53
label: Readability formulas: a critique; title: 53
label: The increment issue; title: 54
label: The variables issue; title: 58
label: The text simplification issue; title: 62
label: Conclusions; title: 63
label: Beyond formulas: how do we proceed?; title: 65
label: 3. Grammar and Readability; title: 65
label: Syntactic Complexity; title: 81
label: Syntactic Ambiguity; title: 81
label: Standard syntactic ambiguity; title: 85
label: Down the garden path; title: 89
label: Ambiguity and context; title: 92
label: Morphology and linking; title: 94
label: Chapter Summary and concluding remarks; title: 97
label: 4. Meaning in Words and Sentences; title: 97
label: Assessing vocabulary difficulty: word lists and word length; title: 101
label: Knowledge, vocabulary, and readability; title: 105
label: Morphological and other background knowledge; title: 108
label: Words and contexts; title: 111
label: Word meaning and contextual knowledge; title: 116
label: Semantic ambiguity; title: 118
label: The nature of reference; title: 120
label: Vagueness and reference; title: 126
label: Ambiguity and reference; title: 128
label: Summary and conclusions; title: 131
label: 5. Coherence and Discourse; title: 132
label: What is coherence?; title: 132
label: Conceptual linking and repetition; title: 133
label: Background knowledge and assumptions; title: 143
label: Genre; title: 147
label: The effects of genre on readability; title: 151
label: Frames and scripts; title: 155
label: Domains; title: 158
label: Connectives; title: 161
label: Coherence and metaphor; title: 162
label: Varieties of metaphor; title: 165
label: Comprehension, fluency, and coherence; title: 173
label: Summary and conclusions; title: 177
label: 6. Towards a Theory of Readability; title: 178
label: Text and context 1: background knowledge and assumptions; title: 181
label: Text and context 2: linguistic code; title: 184
label: Text and context 3: the organization of the text; title: 185
label: Text and context 4: synergistic effects; title: 188
label: The practicality argument; title: 189
label: Readability and education; title: 194
label: Readability and writing to communicate; title: 197
label: A theory of readability; title: 204
label: Notes; title: 205
label: Bibliography; title: 219
label: Index