Results of Survey on Readability Formulas

[Brad Connatser <cwrites -at- USIT -dot- NET>]

Here are the results of the survey on readability formulas I conducted a
few weeks ago. A more comprehensive report of the results will appear in a
journal (undetermined at this point) in the future. The summary of results
follows the survey instrument below:

BEGIN SURVEY
===========
1. Are you familiar with readability formulas?
2. If you are familiar with readability formulas, which ones?
3. What do readability formulas measure?
4. Did you know that some word processors, such as Microsoft Word, have
built-in readability indices?
5. Do you ever use the readability index on your word processor?
6. If so, what do you do with that information?
7. Do you ever calculate by hand or other means the readability score of a
document using the criteria of a readability formula, such as average
sentence length, average number of letters per word, and average number of
syllables per word?
8. If so, what do you do with that information?
=========
END SURVEY

1. Out of the 70 respondents, 62 (88.6%) indicated that they were familiar
with readability formulas.
2. Out of the 62 respondents who indicated familiarity with readability
formulas, most were specifically familiar with variations of the
Flesch-Kincaid or Flesch Reading Ease formula (N= 40, 64.5%) and Gunning's
Fog Index (N = 33, 53.2%).
3. Most (N = 26, 41.9%) of the respondents who were familiar with
readability formulas thought that readability formulas measure the
difficulty of reading or the comprehension level of a text.
4. The majority of respondents (N = 64, 91.4%) knew that some word
processors, such as Microsoft Word, have built-in readability formulas.
5. Three responses to this question were thrown out because of ambiguous
wording. Of the remaining 67 respondents, 39 (58.2%) use readability
formulas, while 28 (41.8%) do not. Of the 39 respondents who use
readability formulas, 41% (N = 16) indicated that they use the indices
routinely. About one fourth (N = 10) of this group of respondents indicated
that they rarely use the formulas.
6. Of the 39 respondents counted as using readability indices on their
computers, more than one third (N = 14, 35.9%) revise texts to match a
particular index value, such as a particular Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
7. Only 13 (18.6%) of the respondents calculate readability scores by hand
or other means. Respondents generally did not indicate how frequently they
perform such calculations.
8. About one quarter of the respondents who calculate readability scores by
hand revise texts to match a particular index, such as a particular
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

Many thanks to the more than seventy participants from TECHWR-L, TECH COM,
COPYEDIT-L, and UTEST.

Brad

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Brad Connatser
Publications Manager
Power Electronics Applications Center
423-974-8316
fax: 423-974-8289
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 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=