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Jim Pinkham notes: <<While I have no doubt there are professional
educators who could and would take valid issue with that kind of
sweeping dismissal...>>
They're welcome to do so, but the facts don't lie: a test that cannot
distinguish between gibberish and valid text is not a useful text.
Period. More convincingly still, the Tech. Comm. article I mentioned
provided no evidence of any correlation between readability indices
and reading comprehension in its literature review.
For the abovementioned editors to make a valid point, they need to
cite studies that show such a correlation. Moreover, that correlation
must be for text that has been edited to ensure that the quality of
the text (rather than the mechanial statistics) is not a confounding
factor. They must also rebut the reductio ad absurdum example of
gibberish text or reversed word orders... which is not possible if
you rely on a solely mechanical count of word and sentence lengths.
<<Both the infamous MS grammar checker and the Flesch readability
index can be tools. As such, they can aid and abet the writer who
judiciously uses them>>
_How_ can they help? If a sentence is eminently clear and readable
despite having a high Flesch index, what purpose would revising the
sentence serve? Conversely, if the sentence is unclear despite having
a low Flesch index, what purpose would accepting the sentence serve.
For readability indices to be useful, they must show a high and
significant correlation with reading comprehension. In the absence of
any such correlation, they're a waste of time and potentially
misleading. Recall the old cliche about "lies, damned lies, and
statistics"?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --
Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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