Tag: readability

Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. Various factors to measure readability have been used, such as “speed of perception,” “perceptibility at a distance,” “perceptibility in peripheral vision,” “visibility,” “the reflex blink technique,” “rate of work” (e.g., speed of reading), “eye movements,” and “fatigue in reading.”
Readability is distinguished from legibility which is a measure of how easily individual letters or characters can be distinguished from each other. Readability can determine the ease in which computer program code can be read by humans, such as through embedded documentation.
Readability has been defined in various ways, e.g. by: The Literacy Dictionary, Jeanne Chall and Edgar Dale, G. Harry McLaughlin, William DuBay.
Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment. So what we write should be easy to understand.
While many writers and speakers since ancient times have used plain language, in the 20th century there was much more focus on reading…