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Evaluation of Textual Readability – An Analysis of its Varying Approaches
Authors: Bidyarani Asem
Number of views: 432
Readability, as opposed to legibility is the ease with which we read and understand a particular written text. This paper takes into consideration the two different approaches to analyze the readability of written texts – the quantitative and qualitative analysis through a survey of subjective testing which involves the analysis of a number of reader characteristics such as degree of knowledge and interest in the subject researches on readability. The quantitative analysis focuses on text-specific objective testing which is solely based on linguistic factors such as word and sentence length which can be easily measured and quantified by using readability formulas. Qualitative analysis focuses on reader-specific, motivation, familiarity of the theme, etc. Detail analysis reveal that along with vocabulary and sentence structure, the reader’s reading ability, prior knowledge, familiarity, interest and expertise on the subject or related field in which the text is written are powerful contributors to determine text readability.