Press releases serve as a major influence on public opinion of a politician, since they are a primary means of communicating with the public and directing discussion. Thus, the public’s ability to digest them is an important factor for politicians to consider. This study employs several well-studied measures of linguistic complexity and proposes a new one to examine whether politicians change their language to become more or less difficult to parse in different situations. This study uses 27,500 press releases from the US Senate between 2004–2008 and examines election cycles and natural disasters, namely hurricanes, as situations where politicians’ language may change. We calculate the syntactic complexity measures clauses per sentence, T-unit length, and complex-T ratio, as well as the Automated Readability Index and Flesch Reading Ease of each press release. We also propose a proof-of-concept measure called logical complexity to find if classical Boolean logic can be applied as a practical linguistic complexity measure. We find that language becomes more complex in coastal senators’ press releases concerning hurricanes, but see no significant change for those in election cycles. Our measure shows similar results to the well-established ones, showing that logical complexity is a useful lens for measuring linguistic complexity.

Several studies indicate that more than half of all college freshmen are not prepared to read and analyze college-level texts. The problem of college reading becomes more formidable when it comes to community college students, who often enter college with socio-linguistic factors that pose challenges to literacy learning. Historically, interventions have consisted of developmental, or remedial, courses after which students are expected to demonstrate college-level literacy. While extensive studies have been conducted on the efficacy of remedial programs in community colleges, few studies have examined how students navigate texts in courses that presuppose proficiency in reading. This grounded theory study investigated ways in which students in an introductory chemistry course at a community college in New York City navigated texts. It documented and analyzed both the students’ beliefs and decisions in the chemistry classroom and outside-of-school spaces as well as the professor’s perspectives of the students. The findings revealed that the notion of literacy reaches beyond the text (Moje, 1996; Rosenblatt, 1988); literacy and intertextuality necessitate the consideration of disciplinary context, instruction, and a larger sociocultural context of the reader. Because of the constantly evolving nature of literacy in context, the findings highlight a need to rethink literacy instruction in the college classroom.

<p>In order to facilitate comprehensibility and translation, the language used in software user documentation must be standardized. If the terminology and language rules are standardized and consistent, the time and cost of translation will be reduced. For this reason, controlled languages have been developed. Controlled languages are subsets of other languages, purposely limited by restricting the terminology and grammar that is allowed.</p><p>The purpose and goal of this thesis is to investigate how using a controlled language can improve comprehensibility and translatability of software user documentation written in English. In order to reach our goal, we have performed a case study at IFS AB. We specify a number of research questions that help satisfy some of the goals of IFS and, when generalized, fulfill the goal of this thesis.</p><p>A major result of our case study is a list of sixteen controlled language rules. Some examples of these rules are control of the maximum allowed number of words in a sentence, and control of when the author is allowed to use past participles. We have based our controlled language rules on existing controlled languages, style guides, research reports, and the opinions of technical writers at IFS.</p><p>When we applied these rules to different user documentation texts at IFS, we managed to increase the readability score for each of the texts. Also, during an assessment test of readability and translatability, the rewritten versions were chosen in 85 % of the cases by experienced technical writers at IFS.</p><p>Another result of our case study is a prototype application that shows that it is possible to develop and use a software checker for helping the authors when writing documentation according to our suggested controlled language rules.</p>

<p>This essay investigates and compares the readability in two different schoolbooks: Eko Historia (the primary school grade 4-6) and Epos Historia (the upper secondary school). The questions of the survey are:</p><p>- Which differences in linguistic and layout can be found between books meant for the primary school and books meant for the upper secondary school?</p><p>- Are the texts easy to read according to the former research in readability?</p><p>In order to answer the questions structural dimensions as lexicon, syntax, bounds between sentences and narrative voices have been studied. Also the texts disposition and typography have been examined.</p><p>The results demonstrate that the book designed for the primary school has a verbal structure with an explicit vocabulary, lots of verbs and short sentences. A clear narrative voice gives an impression of spoken language. The publication also has many pictures and figures. The book aimed for upper secondary school has, in opposite to this, a typical written language with compounded substantives and long noun phrases. There are fewer illustrations and the layout follows a stringent policy. Moreover a high density of information demands the readers to draw conclusion on basis of prior experiences. If the pupils don’t have such previous knowledge the reading can complicates. In spite of this the book, in doubt, shows several signs of readability, for example simple subordinated clauses and strong bounds between the sentences.</p><p>Accordingly, both similarities and differences can be found between the primary and upper secondary schoolbook.</p>

No description available.

When translating from English into Swedish long sentences may be a problem. In this paper an academic text with long sentences and an abstract content is translated and adapted for a larger target reader group. The strategies used in this process of translation and adaptation to make the text more readable are analysed regarding changes in sentence structure, noun phrases and connectors. The terminology of Vinay and Darbelnet’s theoretical model for translation strategies is used to describe some of the changes found. Transposition, such as changes from nouns to verbs and modulation, such as changing from abstract to concrete are frequently used strategies in the process of making the translation adapted for new readers. Furthermore, long sentences have been broken into two or more shorter ones and in this process the importance of connectors has increased to keep the information together. To see the effects of the changes LIX and the ratio between number of nouns and verbs have been used. The LIX value decreased from 64 till 56 for the whole text and the noun verb ratio decreased in all the sentences analysed.

No description available.

The selection of textbooks used at tertiary institutions in South Africa, in the discipline of Accounting, is an area where there is a lack of published studies. Factors citied by academics for selecting prescribed textbooks are the cost of the textbooks, comprehensive coverage of relevant topics and applicability to the South African context. Other criteria, such as readability, are often not taken into consideration. Students feel that the prescribed textbooks are prescribed for the wrong reasons and find them difficult to read and learn from. The research reviews the Managerial Accounting and Finance (MAF) textbooks used at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and other universities. Observations about the textbooks, from staff and students are considered from interviews. / Thesis (M.Ed. (Department of Education)) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This thesis brings together two different lines of research, the nature of passive voice, the nature of readability. Commonly, languages have a range of tools for detransitivisation, topicalisation, and impersonalisation, of which passivisation is one (Givón, 1981). Passives have important roles in our language, and prescribing against their use lacks a full understanding of these roles. Much of the concern around passives from writers, editors, and teachers is no more than folklore that has not clearly analysed various writing and reading problems. Many awkward sentences are not awkward because they use passives but because they are wordy, clumsy, or pretentious. Most criticisms have little basis in linguistic theory, and rarely is there more than passing mention of the important role that passives play in communication. Some uses of passives are inappropriate, being vague, ambiguous, or even deceitful. These inappropriate uses of passive voice give the construction a bad name. They have become ammunition for prescriptive grammarians to fire at all uses of passives, often with weak analysis and minimal reference to linguistic theory. ‘Avoid passives’ has become a mantra. I tentatively suggest that there is unlikely to be a cost to processing passives. Given the speed at which the brain processes clauses, any differences in readability (if they exist) must be miniscule. Consequently, I suggest that any differences are unimportant relative to the benefits that appropriately used passives bring to readability. Furthermore, appropriately used passives may actually improve readability, especially when there is greater interest in the passive subject than the active subject, and when the passive serves to connect clauses or sentences.

This project sought to find a rigorous and manageable method for measuring the difficulty of texts in te reo Māori written for children, beyond junior reading material in Māori-medium educational settings. The project examined a range of readability measures based on semantic and/or syntactic features of text, following the work of Warwick Elley (1969) and Richard Benton et al. (1995). Features such as the difficulty of content words, average sentence length, standardised type:token ratios and the use of function words were used in different combinations to create seven methods to measure text difficulty. Teachers’ and students’ ratings of text difficulty, and students’ scores on reading comprehension tasks related to the texts were used as criteria to examine the validity of the readability methods. The findings revealed that indices of either vocabulary load or lexical density when used in combination with the number of function types in the text, produce statistical significance with the criterion measures. Further research is needed to confirm their validity for use in Māori –medium classroom settings. The Māori word lists developed for this project as the basis of the readability approaches have the potential for more widespread analyses of language proficiency measures for students in Māori-medium settings.