Introduction to a New Approach to Readability
Why is something easy to read? Why is one text easier to understand than another? Are some works understandable only if you have achieved a certain level of reading ability? These are the kinds of basic questions with which the study of readability is concerned. The term "readability" has often been associated with readability formulas (Klare 1963: 29) statistical tools intended to objectively measure the relative difficulty of texts. However, on the most basic level it is an inquiry into what properties of texts help or hinder communication.