Readability - Early Research

Early Research

In the 1880s, English professor L. A. Sherman found that the English sentence was getting shorter. In Elizabethan times, the average sentence was 50 words long. In his own time, it was 23 words long.

Sherman's work established that:

• Literature is a subject for statistical analysis.
• Shorter sentences and concrete terms help people to make sense of what is written.
• Speech is easier to understand than text.
• Over time, text becomes easier if it is more like speech.

Sherman wrote: "Literary English, in short, will follow the forms of standard spoken English from which it comes. No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk.... The oral sentence is clearest because it is the product of millions of daily efforts to be clear and strong. It represents the work of the race for thousands of years in perfecting an effective instrument of communication.'

In 1889 in Russia, the writer Nikolai A. Rubakin published his study of over 10,000 texts written by everyday people. From these texts, he took out 1,500 words which he thought were understood by most people. He found that the main blocks were 1. strange words and 2. the use of too many long sentences. Starting with his own journal at the age of 13, Rubakin published many articles and books on science and many subjects for the great numbers of new readers throughout Russia. In Rubakin's view, the people were not fools. They were simply poor and in need of cheap books, written at a level they could grasp.

In 1921, Harry D. Kitson published The Mind of the Buyer, one of the first uses of psychology in marketing. Kitson's work showed that each type of reader bought and read their own type of text. On reading two newspapers (the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago American) and two magazines (the Century and the American), he found that sentence length and word length were the best signs of being easy to read.