Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Aids to Audience Decision Making 159

In one study, four texts were revised using a “writing to the formulas” approach. Readers given

the revised texts did not fi nd them easier to comprehend than the originals. When the four texts

were revised a second time, changes that did make the texts easier to comprehend ran counter to

what the formulas would suggest.^153 Similarly, a test of revised jury instructions showed that revised

instructions that simply improved readability scores resulted in no greater comprehension than the

original instructions.^154 A similar study tested car owners’ comprehension of three versions of an

automobile recall letter. The original version of the recall letter scored “diffi cult” on the Flesch

scale. A revision of the recall letter lowered the score to “fairly easy.” Car owners who read the

revised letter did not have signifi cantly better comprehension than those who read the original

version.^155 For readability-based revisions to improve comprehension, the revisions must lower

reading diffi culty scores signifi cantly. For formulas that calculate a grade level, the grade level must

be lowered by at least 6.5 grades to have an impact on readers’ comprehension.^156

Simple Sentence Structure

One reason for the seemingly contradictory fi ndings about readability formulas is that sentence

length is only a rough measure of syntactic complexity.^157 Another cause of syntactic problems is

the placement of phrases and clauses within a sentence. For example, sentences with subordinate

clauses placed in the middle of them are more diffi cult to understand than sentences with clauses

placed at the beginning.^158 Sentences with phrases added either to the beginning or middle are

more diffi cult to comprehend than sentences with phrases added to the end.^159 And sentences with

more embedded propositions take longer to read than less syntactically complex sentences of equal

length.^160

In addition to being imperfect measures of syntactic complexity, readability formulas do not

measure other factors that also affect the audience’s comprehension of a text. These factors include

the text’s organization and cohesiveness, the reader’s prior knowledge of the topic, and how well

the purpose of the text matches the purpose of the reader. In fact, readability formulas cannot dis-

tinguish a meaningful sequence of sentences from a sequence of randomly selected sentences. Even

complete nonsense or scrambled sentences can score as very readable.^161

Parallel Sentence Structure

Another aid to syntactic analysis in particular and to sentence comprehension in general is the

use of parallelism , or the repetition of the syntax of a clause or sentence in the clause or sentence

that immediately follows it. As illustrated in Table 4.2, parallelism is a technique job applicants

often use when listing their accomplishments in their résumés. Notice how each bulleted sen-

tence starts with an active verb in the past tense. Of course, job applicants are not the only ones

TABLE 4.2 Examples of Sentences Written in Parallel From an MBA’s Résumé

• Achieved 100% increase in reporting and administrative productivity by developing local infor-

mation system using database and corporate payroll software.

• Generated 30% increase in delivery reliability and 40% decrease in backorders from in-house

supplier by implementing order entry process enhancements.

• Led team of marketing managers to redesign departmental structure. Increased customer focus

through addition of product training and market analysis functions.