Reading is a process through which the reader tries to gain knowledge by deriving meaning from printed or written texts. During reading, the reader tries to retrieve information and understand the meaning of the text. This is called readability. For casual readers, the effort that goes into retrieving information and understanding meaning is lesser than an intense reader. Having a prior knowledge of a subject, or its structure, makes readability easier. When information is provided on a new subject in a way that is difficult to understand, the readability becomes hard. During the process of reading, the person connects ideas with earlier knowledge about the subject he is reading. This will help in clarifying certain confusing parts in the text. Readers vary in their reading skills. While some readers scan through the text, other may read it word by word. For these reasons, the readability of a text for government or public information purposes is designed with a readability score that enables easy readability for most people in the population. (Klare, 2000; DuBay, 2004)
Readability can be measured in term of different factors like narrative style, genre, text quality, the density of the text and presence of difficult concepts. There is no foolproof method to measure readability. The readability of English text is commonly measured using Flesch–Kincaid readability tests. This test, scores the ease of reading, based on the total sentences, total words, and syllables used in the text. Longer texts tend to have a poorer score. The best way to understand readability is to distribute the text to a small group of people with characteristic similar to the intended population, and then receive feedback about the text, in terms of time taken to read and ability to understand the concepts presented by the text. (Colaco, Svider, Agarwal, Eloy, & Jackson, 2013; De Franco, Hope, Vyas, & Zhou, 2014)
References
Colaco, M., Svider, P., Agarwal, N., Eloy, J., & Jackson, I. (2013). Readability Assessment of Online Urology Patient Education Materials. The Journal of Urology, 189(3), 1048-1052. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2012.08.255
De Franco, G., Hope, O., Vyas, D., & Zhou, Y. (2014). Analyst Report Readability. Contemporary Accounting Research, 32(1), 76-104. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.12062
DuBay, W. (2004). The Principles of readability. Retrieved 27 August 2016 from http://www.impact- information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf). William DuBay.
Klare, G. (2000). The measurement of readability. ACM J. Comput. Doc., 24(3), 107-121. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/344599.344630
