This is a continuation of the previous post linked here.
Reading between readability
Readability is related mostly to the perception of the content by readers. This is one of the concepts that doesn't deal with just the writer. This is where the reader also starts contributing to the formulation and writing of the content. What had been essentially a writer-centered craft till now, starts getting informed by the readers’ perception.
Hemmingway App which measures this ‘Readability’ quantitatively, claims that it builds on the researches in this field that aim to decipher how understandable a piece of writing is.1
Now, when stated that way, the concept of Readability seems to have set itself up for a daunting task, I think.
Because how does one decide how understandable a piece of writing is? How does one understand the prejudices, literary capabilities, contextual knowledge of all the sets of readers, and the various undercurrents of changes that a language or a dialect undergoes from time to time?
On comprehension
But then, we do have these intuitions about whether a content piece will communicate effectively what it’s meant to or not while reading it. But does that say something about the content piece or our own comprehension abilities? Because our assessment of any piece of text is influenced and shaped deeply by our own repertoire of readings, writings, experiences, contextual knowledge, the language that is used around us, even culture, and so on.
So how justified are we in making such claims about a piece of writing?
There is no clear answer to this question, I think. But our own judgments and perceptions of texts have to mean something, or else the entire field of literary criticism, textual exegesis, and the likes will collapse.
There has to be at least a personal truth in our perception of a piece of reading. Also, we need to recognize the fact that our perception and experiences might not be reflected or replicated in someone else reading that same piece.
Measuring the comprehension of a text
So then we are back to square one - is there a way to measure the inherent understanding, or what we call readability, of a text?
This is where tools like Hemmingway, Grammarly, and the likes come up.
These tools basically remove the direct human judge which is almost always informed by the human experience and replace it with an algorithm. Of course, that algorithm has to be influenced by human experience in some way or the other. But that’s remote and is mostly based on syntactical rules of the language as well as numerous so-called thumb rules, like reducing the usage of adverbs.
So when you measure the readability of a text, what you are actually measuring is how compliant your text is with the existing algorithm and the so-called thumb rules. The semantics of the text, which is what contributes to the comprehension portion of the text, are largely un-measured. Semantics for the most part require the comprehension and ability of language which means it will require a human mind.
So what really can readability tell us?
My idea is not to discard the concept of readability. But to understand it and find what it tells us about a text.
If not the semantic comprehension, can it at least say something about the way in which I construct sentences that might be difficult to understand or some rules of language that might make a text un-readable by a certain reading section?
Does it measure the famed un-readability of classic novels and texts by Shakespeare, Dickens, and so on?
To understand this, I did a small experiment.
My experiment with readability
Hemmingway App measures the readability of writing as per US Grade Standards. It basically tells us which U.S. grade level training is required to understand a piece of text. So out of curiosity, I entered a few famous and not-so-famous selections of passages, from different fields and times, into the app to see what readability scores get assigned to these.
I started with the first few sections of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemmingway, the American writer after whom the app is named, and here’s what I got-
I then entered the famous and popular opening paragraph of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens into the app and here’s the result-
I also entered one of the songs in William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’-
Next, I entered the first few paragraphs of Wikipedia’s article on the Riemann Hypothesis.
These results, of course, do not represent the analysis of the whole canon of the writing done by these writers or the platform. Also, one has to understand that the next paragraph from the same book or article might be recorded differently on the readability scale by the app. However, these texts can help us understand what we are measuring when we are measuring readability.
So, here’s a summary of this tiny experiment arranged in descending grades:
Grade 2 - Song from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’
Grade 4 - Opening paragraphs of Hemmingway’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’
Grade 12 - Opening paragraphs of Wikipedia’s article on the Riemann Hypothesis
Post Graduate - Dicken’s opening paragraph of Dicken’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
Now, this is a surprising turn of events. At least for me.
The song from ‘The Tempest’ is laced with old English and has a rich usage of the range of English vocabulary. This is usually considered a challenging text to comprehend. But as per the readability measurement, this could be understood by a Grade 2 person. Either that or there is something off.
On the other hand, Dicken’s opening paragraph, not only establishes the credulity and dichotomy of the time of the French Revolution, using repetition of ideas and explanation, it is considered one of the easiest texts to follow. One can just read it to verify this claim. Again, as per the tool, it is a Post-graduate level read.
Explaining a concept like Riemann Hypothesis, which rattles many mathematicians’ brains, cannot be done without some of the jargon and vocabulary of mathematics. However, this doesn’t render it incomprehensible to a Grade 10 mathematically-trained person or make it easy to understand for a Grade 12 person not trained in mathematics. Being fair to Wikipedia, the usage of words is simple, sentences are short but the context and the ideas inherent in the text are not.
Hemmingway’s storytelling in the opening paragraphs of the text builds on scenery and paints a picture in the reader’s mind. While his text on reading, feels a lot simpler, in my opinion, than Shakespeare’s songs, they are at a higher grade on the readability scale. So there’s that.
Grades of readability
This experiment reaffirms to some degree my earlier argument that readability doesn’t measure the comprehensibility of the text from a semantics lens.
Moreover, the assigned scores are in terms of grades.
This is built on the assumption that as we progress up the grade levels, the readability of the text decreases, that is, the texts become difficult to understand progressively.
So Grade 10 text is difficult to understand than Grade 5 text.
But is this so?
If this was true, it must mean that as we progress the language somehow becomes more cumbersome and the vocabulary more tedious to understand.
And if this is so, does it mean that you can still explain the Riemann hypothesis to a Grade 2 person by using simpler words, lesser adverbs, and tips from all these readability apps?
I am afraid not.
Because to talk about Riemann Hypothesis, you have to prepare the person with progressive mathematical concepts like number theory, the concept of hypothesis, complex numbers, and others. It’s more of a contextual and knowledge-based problem rather than about the mode of expression.
Of course one has to express as simply as possible to be comprehensive to a larger audience. But this might be limited to switching synonyms with alternatives that are perceived as simpler or are more popular.
Also, the wordiness of a sentence affects clarity. But that doesn’t mean that using rich and precise words should be avoided. The cost of meaning is always greater than the cost of expression.
In fact, the way we express a thought in a sentence remains the same even as grades change. ‘I need a glass of water’ doesn’t become something else in terms of how we create sentences just because we cleared Grade 10. Nor do we find anyone at the Post-graduate level saying- ‘I have the desire to consume an edible liquid compound of di-oxygenated hydrogen’.
The idea of words
What actually happens as the grades progress, is an incremental increase in the complexity and depth of the ideas being served to the individual in these grades. What this means, is that our vocabulary has to expand and our understanding of the world has to incorporate a larger picture and jargon from different fields of studies.
And to talk about these ideas one has to consequently enrich the language. And our knowledge of words and expressions.
In fact, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
Market-ed-it is my effort to understand what drives marketing and what impact it has on the humans of marketing and the ones marketed to. Do subscribe to receive email updates as soon as I publish new posts here.
https://hemingwayapp.com/help.html#readability