Editing Readability (section)

=== Early research ===
For centuries, teachers and educators have seen the importance of organization, coherence, and emphasis in good writing. 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: "No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk..." He wrote this wanting to emphasize that the closer writing is to speech, the more clear and effective the content becomes.<ref name="Sherman2">Sherman, Lucius Adelno 1893. ''Analytics of literature: A manual for the objective study of English prose and poetry''. Boston: Ginn and Co.</ref>

In 1889 in Russia, the writer Nikolai A. Rubakin published a study of over 10,000 texts written by everyday people.<ref name="Choldin" /> 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''.<ref name="Lorge1944a">Lorge, I. 1944. "Word lists as background for communication." ''Teachers College Record'' 45:543–552.</ref> 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.<ref name="Choldin">{{Citation | last = Choldin | first = M.T. |author-link=Marianna Tax Choldin| contribution = Rubakin, Nikolai Aleksandrovic | year = 1979 | title = Encyclopedia of library and information science | editor-last = Kent | editor-first = Allen | editor2-last = Lancour | editor2-first = Harold | editor3-last = Nasri | editor3-first = William Z. | editor4-last = Daily | editor4-first = Jay Elwood | volume = 26 | pages = 178–179 | publisher = CRC Press | edition = illustrated | isbn = 978-0-8247-2026-1 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=hr1RHr8lRcUC&pg=PA178}}</ref>