Readability of Expository Paragraphs with Identical or Related Sentence Topics

Abstract

This research is part of an attempt to discover significant factors of readability for connected expository prose. Keeping the content of expository paragraphs identical, I varied their forms using the Functional Sentence Perspectivists' rule for relating old and new information within the sentences of connected discourse. Rule-governed forms had identical or closely related sentence topics; variants had only remotely related sentence topics. In three tests involving subjective readability judgments, a very significant number of the 455 total high-school subjects found the rule-governed forms more readable than their variants. Thus there is reason to believe that the relationship between sentence topics is probably a very important factor of readability for expository prose.

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