Editing Readability (section)

=== Measuring coherence and organization ===
Beginning in the 1970s, cognitive theorists began teaching that reading is really an act of thinking and organization. The reader constructs meaning by mixing new knowledge into existing knowledge. Because of the limits of the reading ease formulas, some research looked at ways to measure the content, organization, and coherence of text. Although this did not improve the reliability of the formulas, their efforts showed the importance of these variables in reading ease.

Studies by [[Walter Kintch]] and others showed the central role of coherence in reading ease, mainly for people learning to read.<ref name="Kintsch">Kintsch, W. and J. R. Miller 1981. "Readability: A view from cognitive psychology." In ''Teaching: Research reviews.'' Newark, DE: International Reading Assn.</ref> In 1983, Susan Kemper devised a formula based on physical states and mental states. However, she found this was no better than word familiarity and sentence length in showing reading ease.<ref name="Kemper">Kemper, S. 1983. "Measuring the inference load of a text." ''Journal of educational psychology'' 75, no. 3:391–401.</ref>

Bonnie Meyer and others tried to use organization as a measure of reading ease. While this did not result in a formula, they showed that people read faster and retain more when the text is organized into topics. She found that a visible plan for presenting content greatly helps readers to assess a text. A hierarchical plan shows how the parts of the text are related. It also aids the reader in blending new information into existing knowledge structures.<ref name="Meyer">Meyer, B. J. 1982. "Reading research and the teacher: The importance of plans." ''College composition and communication'' 33, no. 1:37–49.</ref>

Bonnie Armbruster found that the most important feature for learning and comprehension is textual coherence, which comes in two types:
*Global coherence, which integrates high-level ideas as themes in an entire section, chapter, or book.
*Local coherence, which joins ideas within and between sentences.

Armbruster confirmed Kintsch's finding that coherence and structure are more help for younger readers.<ref name="Armbruster">Armbruster, B. B. 1984. "The problem of inconsiderate text" In ''Comprehension instruction'', ed. G. Duffy. New York: Longmann, p. 202–217.</ref> R. C. Calfee and R. Curley built on Bonnie Meyer's work and found that an unfamiliar underlying structure can make even simple text hard to read. They brought in a graded system to help students progress from simpler story lines to more advanced and abstract ones.<ref name="Calfee">Calfee, R. C. and R. Curley. 1984. "Structures of prose in content areas." In ''Understanding reading comprehension'', ed. J. Flood. Newark, DE: International Reading Assn., pp. 414–430.</ref>

Many other studies looked at the effects on reading ease of other text variables, including:
* Image words, abstraction, direct and indirect statements, types of narration and sentences, phrases, and clauses;<ref name="Gray" />
* Difficult concepts;<ref name="Chall" />
* Idea density;<ref name="Dolch">Dolch. E. W. 1939. "Fact burden and reading difficulty." ''Elementary English review'' 16:135–138.</ref>
* Human interest;<ref name="Gunning2" /><ref name="Fleschwrite">{{cite book |last=Flesch |first=R. |author-link=Rudolf Flesch |year=1949 |title=The Art of Readable Writing |location=New York |publisher=Harper |oclc=318542}}</ref>
* Nominalization;<ref name="ColemanBlu">Coleman, E. B. and P. J. Blumenfeld. 1963. "Cloze scores of nominalization and their grammatical transformations using active verbs." ''Psychology reports'' 13:651–654.</ref>
* Active and passive voice;<ref name="Gough">Gough, P. B. 1965. "Grammatical transformations and the speed of understanding." ''Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior'' 4:107–111.</ref><ref name="Coleman">Coleman, E. B. 1966. "Learning of prose written in four grammatical transformations." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 49:332–341.</ref><ref name="Clark">Clark, H. H. and S. E. Haviland. 1977. "Comprehension and the given-new contract." In ''Discourse production and comprehension,'' ed. R. O. Freedle. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Press, pp. 1–40.</ref><ref name="Hornby">Hornby, P. A. 1974. "Surface structure and presupposition." ''Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior'' 13:530–538.</ref>
* Embeddedness;<ref name="Coleman" />
* Structural cues;<ref name="Spyridakis">Spyridakis, J. H. 1989. "Signaling effects: A review of the research-Part 1." ''Journal of technical writing and communication'' 19, no 3:227-240.</ref><ref name="Spyri2">Spyridakis, J. H. 1989. "Signaling effects: Increased content retention and new answers-Part 2." ''Journal of technical writing and communication'' 19, no. 4:395–415.</ref>
* The use of images;<ref name="Halbert">Halbert, M. G. 1944. "The teaching value of illustrated books." ''American school board journal'' 108, no. 5:43–44.</ref><ref name="Vernon">Vernon, M. D. 1946. "Learning from graphic material." ''British journal of psychology'' 36:145–158.</ref>
* Diagrams and line graphs;<ref name="Felker">Felker, D. B., F. Pickering, V. R. Charrow, V. M. Holland, and J. C. Redish. 1981. ''Guidelines for document designers.'' Washington, D. C: American Institutes for Research.</ref>
* Highlighting;<ref name="Klarehigh">Klare, G. R., J. E. Mabry, and L. M. Gustafson. 1955. "The relationship of patterning (underlining) to immediate retention and to acceptability of technical material." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 39, no 1:40–42.</ref>
*Fonts and layout;<ref name="Klaretypo">Klare, G. R. 1957. "The relationship of typographic arrangement to the learning of technical material." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 41, no 1:41–45.</ref>
*Document age.<ref name="Jatowt">Jatowt, A. and K. Tanaka. 2012. "Longitudinal analysis of historical texts' readability." ''Proceedings of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2012'' 353-354</ref>

[[Coh-Metrix]] can be used in many different ways to investigate the cohesion of the explicit text and the coherence of the mental representation of the text. "Our definition of [[Cohesion (linguistics)|cohesion]] consists of characteristics of the explicit text that play some role in helping the reader mentally connect ideas in the text."<ref name="graesser2003">{{Citation | last1 = Graesser | first1 = A.C. | last2 = McNamara | first2 = D.S. | last3 = Louwerse | first3 = M.M. | editor-last = Sweet | editor-first = A.P. | editor2-last = Snow | editor2-first = C.E. | year = 2003 | title = What do readers need to learn in order to process coherence relations in narrative and expository text | work = Rethinking reading comprehension | publisher = Guilford Publications | publication-place = New York | pages = 82–98}}</ref> The definition of coherence is the subject of much debate. Theoretically, the coherence of a text is defined by the interaction between linguistic representations and knowledge representations. While coherence can be defined as characteristics of the text (i.e., aspects of cohesion) that are likely to contribute to the coherence of the mental representation, Coh-Metrix measurements provide indices of these cohesion characteristics.<ref name="graesser2003" />