Readability is in the Mind of the Reader

A student lab experiment was conducted in which eighty-nine subjects wererandomly assigned to four experimental conditions. The subjects received either aCode reading or a Commentary reading. The subjects answered fifteen questionsabout the reading and rated the complexity of the reading onfive dimensions. Thesubjects assigned to the Code reading had significantlyfewer correct responses andtook significantly longer to answer the experimental questions than subjectsassigned to the Commentary reading. Also, the Code reading was perceived by thesubjects to be significantly more complex than the Commentary reading. Theseexperimental results are in contrast to the Flesch Readability Formula andGunning Fog Index readability level of the two passages, which showed the twopresentation styles (code/legal and commentary/prose) to be of approximate equaldifficulty.