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84-514: The first work on Basic English was written by two Englishmen, Ivor Richards of Harvard University and Charles Kay Ogden of the University of Cambridge in England. The design of Basic English drew heavily on the semiotic theory put forward by Ogden and Richards in their 1923 book The Meaning of Meaning . Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after

168-563: A constructed language called Speedtalk , in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single phoneme , as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen. The Lord's Prayer has been often used for an impressionistic language comparison: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. Let your kingdom come. Let your pleasure be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day bread for our needs. And make us free of our debts, as we have made free those who are in debt to us. And let us not be put to

252-515: A controlled small vocabulary which makes an extensive use of paraphrasing . Most notably, Ogden allowed only 18 verbs, which he called "operators". His "General Introduction" says, "There are no 'verbs' in Basic English", with the underlying assumption that, as noun use in English is very straightforward but verb use/conjugation is not, the elimination of verbs would be a welcome simplification. What

336-642: A clear and readable style, Bryson found that it was rare. He wrote that such language is the result of a "... discipline and artistry that few people who have ideas will take the trouble to achieve... If simple language were easy, many of our problems would have been solved long ago." Bryson helped set up the Readability Laboratory at the college. Two of his students were Irving Lorge and Rudolf Flesch . In 1934, Ralph Ojemann investigated adult reading skills, factors that most directly affect reading ease, and causes of each level of difficulty. He did not invent

420-568: A first-level student should graduate with a core vocabulary of around 1200 words. A realistic general core vocabulary could contain around 2000 words (the core 850 words, plus 200 international words, and 1000 words for the general fields of trade, economics, and science). It is enough for a "standard" English level. This 2000 word vocabulary represents "what any learner should know". At this level students could start to move on their own. Ogden's Basic English 2000 word list and Voice of America's Special English 1500 word list serve as dictionaries for

504-427: A formula, but a method for assessing the difficulty of materials for parent education . He was the first to assess the validity of this method by using 16 magazine passages tested on actual readers. He evaluated 14 measurable and three reported factors that affect reading ease. Ojemann emphasized the reported features, such as whether the text was coherent or unduly abstract. He used his 16 passages to compare and judge

588-403: A list of 100 words particularly useful in a general field (e.g., science, verse, business), along with a 50-word list from a more specialised subset of that general field, to make a basic 1000-word vocabulary for everyday work and life. Moreover, Ogden assumed that any student should already be familiar with (and thus may only review) a core subset of around 200 "international" words. Therefore,

672-462: A pretest that any writer can use to anticipate the impact of their words on their audience. According to Richards, feedforward allows the writer to then engage with their text to make necessary changes to create a better effect. He believes that communicators who do not use feedforward will seem dogmatic. Richards wrote more in depth about the idea and importance of feedforward in communication in his book Speculative Instruments and said that feedforward

756-536: A professor in 1944, he remained there until his retirement in 1963. In 1974, he returned to Cambridge, having retained his fellowship at Magdalene, and lived in Wentworth House in the grounds of the college until his death five years later. In 1926, Richards married Dorothy Pilley , whom he had met on a mountain climbing holiday in Wales. She died in 1986. Pilley's book recounts many of the climbs they did together in

840-551: A project sponsored by the U.S. Navy, the Reading Ease formula was recalculated to give a grade-level score. The new formula is now called the Flesch–Kincaid grade-level formula. The Linsear Write Raygor readability estimate was developed in 1977. In 1978, John Bormuth of the University of Chicago looked at reading ease using the new Cloze deletion test developed by Wilson Taylor. His work supported earlier research including

924-424: A readability formula to predict the difficulty of adult reading material. Investigators in many fields began using it to improve communications. One of the variables it used was personal references, such as names and personal pronouns. Another variable was affixes . In 1947, Donald Murphy of Wallace's Farmer used a split-run edition to study the effects of making text easier to read. He found that reducing from

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1008-453: A salary for Richards to teach the new, and untested, academic field of English literature. Instead, like an old-style instructor, he collected weekly tuition directly from the students as they entered the classroom. Richards was appointed a college lecturer in English and moral sciences at Magdalene in 1922. Four years later, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge was formally established, he

1092-479: A simplified English based upon a vocabulary of 850 words. IV. The Times of India Guide to Basic English (1938) sought to develop Basic English as an international auxiliary language, an interlanguage . Richards' travels, especially in China, effectively situated him as the advocate for an international program, such as Basic English. Moreover, at Harvard University, in his international pedagogy, he began to integrate

1176-680: A text. Text leveling is commonly used to rank the reading ease of texts in areas where reading difficulties are easy to identify, such as books for young children. At higher levels, ranking reading ease becomes more difficult, as individual difficulties become harder to identify. This has led to better ways to assess reading ease. In the 1920s, the scientific movement in education looked for tests to measure students' achievement to aid in curriculum development. Teachers and educators had long known that, to improve reading skill, readers—especially beginning readers—need reading material that closely matches their ability. University-based psychologists did much of

1260-402: A variety of settings and regions. The test used a number of passages from newspapers , magazines, and books—as well as a standard reading test. They found a mean grade score of 7.81 (eighth month of the seventh grade ). About one-third read at the 2nd to 6th- grade level , one-third at the 7th to 12th-grade level, and one-third at the 13th–17th grade level. The authors emphasized that one-half of

1344-424: A work noted for a wide vocabulary. Shannon notes that the lack of vocabulary in Basic English leads to a very high level of redundancy , whereas Joyce's large vocabulary "is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content". In the novel The Shape of Things to Come , published in 1933, H. G. Wells depicted Basic English as the lingua franca of a new elite that after a prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting

1428-477: Is an empirical study of inferior response to a literary text. As an instructor in English literature at Cambridge University, Richards tested the critical-thinking abilities of his pupils; he removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems and asked undergraduates to write interpretations, in order to ascertain the likely impediments to an adequate response to a literary text. That experiment in

1512-507: Is code, news information, or storytelling, every writer has a target audience that they have to adjust their readability levels to. The term "readability" is inherently broad and can become confusing when examining all of the possible definitions. Readability is a concept that involves audience, content, quality, legibility, and can even involve the formatting and design structure of any given text. Different definitions of readability exist from various sources. The definition fluctuates based on

1596-540: Is often recommended for use in healthcare. The Golub Syntactic Density Score was developed by Lester Golub in 1974. In 1973, a study commissioned by the US military of the reading skills required for different military jobs produced the FORCAST formula. Unlike most other formulas, it uses only a vocabulary element, making it useful for texts without complete sentences. The formula satisfied requirements that it would be: In 1975, in

1680-472: Is read. This was called reading persistence, depth, or perseverance He also found that people will read less of long articles than of short ones, for example, a story nine paragraphs long will lose 3 out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph. In contrast, a shorter story will lose only 2 out of 10 readers. A study in 1947 by Melvin Lostutter showed that newspapers were generally written at a level five years above

1764-504: Is subject to criticism as unfairly biased towards the native speaker community. As a teaching aid for English as a second language , Basic English has been criticised for the choice of the core vocabulary and for its grammatical constraints. In 1944, readability expert Rudolf Flesch published an article in Harper's Magazine , "How Basic is Basic English?" in which he said, "It's not basic, and it's not English." The essence of his complaint

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1848-517: Is that the vocabulary is too restricted, and, as a result, the text ends up being awkward and more difficult than necessary. He also argues that the words in the Basic vocabulary were arbitrarily selected, and notes that there had been no empirical studies showing that it made language simpler. In his 1948 paper " A Mathematical Theory of Communication ", Claude Shannon contrasted the limited vocabulary of Basic English with James Joyce 's Finnegans Wake ,

1932-499: Is the referent, the thing, in reality. Placed in the left corner is the symbol or word. At the top point, the convergence of the literal word and the object in reality; it is our intangible idea about the object. Ultimately, the English meaning of the words is determined by an individual's unique experience. When the Saturday Review asked Richards to write a piece for their "What I Have Learned" series, Richards (then aged 75) took

2016-529: The Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. He was convinced that the world needed to gradually eradicate minority languages and use as much as possible only one: English, in either a simple or complete form. Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar simplifications have been devised for various international uses. Richards promoted its use in schools in China. It has influenced

2100-547: The Simple English Misplaced Pages . Basic English includes a simple grammar for modifying or combining its 850 words to talk about additional meanings ( morphological derivation or inflection ). The grammar is based on English, but simplified. Like all international auxiliary languages (or IALs), Basic English may be criticised as inevitably based on personal preferences, and is thus, paradoxically, inherently divisive. Moreover, like all natural-language-based IALs, Basic

2184-504: The University of Chicago and Bernice Leary of Xavier College in Chicago published What Makes a Book Readable, one of the most important books in readability research. Like Dale and Tyler, they focused on what makes books readable for adults of limited reading ability. Their book included the first scientific study of the reading skills of American adults. The sample included 1,690 adults from

2268-439: The pedagogical approach—critical reading without contexts—demonstrated the variety and depth of the possible textual misreadings that might be committed, by university students and laymen alike. The critical method derived from that pedagogical approach did not propose a new hermeneutics , a new methodology of interpretation, but questioned the purposes and efficacy of the critical process of literary interpretation, by analysing

2352-420: The psychological processes of writing and reading poetry. In reading poetry and making sense of it "in the degree in which we can order ourselves, we need nothing more"; the reader need not believe the poetry, because the literary importance of poetry is in provoking emotions in the reader. As a rhetorician, Richards said that the old form of studying rhetoric (the art of discourse ) was too concerned with

2436-462: The 16th to the 11th-grade level, where it remains today. Publishers discovered that the Flesch formulas could increase readership up to 60%. Flesch's work made an enormous impact on journalism. The Flesch Reading Ease formula became one of the most widely used, tested, and reliable readability metrics. In 1951, Farr, Jenkins, and Patterson simplified the formula further by changing the syllable count. In

2520-549: The 1920's and 1930s, including their celebrated 1928 first ascent of the north north west ridge of the Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps. The life and intellectual influence of I. A. Richards approximately corresponds to his intellectual interests; many endeavours were in collaboration with the linguist , philosopher, and writer Charles Kay Ogden (C. K. Ogden), notably in four books: I. Foundations of Aesthetics (1922) presents

2604-432: The 1940s, Robert Gunning helped bring readability research into the workplace. In 1944, he founded the first readability consulting firm dedicated to reducing the "fog" in newspapers and business writing. In 1952, he published The Technique of Clear Writing with his own Fog Index, a formula that correlates 0.91 with comprehension as measured by reading tests. Edgar Dale , a professor of education at Ohio State University,

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2688-566: The 9th to the 6th-grade reading level increased readership by 43% for an article about 'nylon'. He also found a 60% increase in readership for an article on corn, with better responses from people under 35. The result was a gain of 42,000 readers in a circulation of 275,000. Wilber Schramm, who directed the Communications Research program at the University of Illinois interviewed 1,050 newspaper readers in 1947. He found that an easier reading style helps to determine how much of an article

2772-522: The Chicago School was both indebted to Richards's theory and critical of its psychological assumptions. They all admitted the value of his seminal ideas but sought to salvage what they considered his most useful assumptions from the theoretical excesses they felt he brought to bear in his criticism. Like Empson, Richards proved a difficult model for the New Critics, but his model of close reading provided

2856-732: The College Entrance Examination Board. In 1988, Jack Stenner and his associates at MetaMetrics, Inc. published the Lexile Framework for assessing readability and matching students with appropriate texts. The Lexile framework uses average sentence length, and average word frequency in the American Heritage Intermediate Corpus to predict a score on a 0–2000 scale. The AHI Corpus includes five million words from 1,045 published works often read by students in grades three to nine. In 2000, researchers of

2940-658: The Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) presents the triadic theory of semiotics that depends upon psychological theory, and so anticipates the importance of psychology in the exercise of literary criticism. Semioticians, such as Umberto Eco , acknowledged that the methodology of the triadic theory of semiotics improved upon the methodology of the dyadic theory of semiotics presented by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). III. Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930) describes

3024-539: The McCall-Crabbs reading tests. In 1948, Bernard Feld did a study of every item and ad in the Birmingham News of 20 November 1947. He divided the items into those above the 8th-grade level and those at the 8th grade or below. He chose the 8th-grade breakpoint, as that was determined to be the average reading level of adult readers. An 8th-grade text "...will reach about 50% of all American grown-ups," he wrote. Among

3108-532: The School Renaissance Institute and Touchstone Applied Science Associates published their Advantage-TASA Open Standard (ATOS) Reading ease Formula for Books. They worked on a formula that was easy to use and that could be used with any texts. The project was one of the widest reading ease projects ever. The developers of the formula used 650 normed reading texts, 474 million words from all the text in 28,000 books read by students. The project also used

3192-669: The World needs most is about 1,000 more dead languages—and one more alive. Ogden's word lists include only word roots , which in practice are extended with the defined set of affixes and the full set of forms allowed for any available word (noun, pronoun, or the limited set of verbs). The 850 core words of Basic English are found in Wiktionary's Basic English word list . This core is theoretically enough for everyday life. However, Ogden prescribed that any student should learn an additional 150-word list for everyday work in some particular field, by adding

3276-433: The ability of average American adult readers. The reading ease of newspaper articles was not found to have much connection with the education, experience, or personal interest of the journalists writing the stories. It instead had more to do with the convention and culture of the industry. Lostutter argued for more readability testing in newspaper writing. Improved readability must be a "conscious process somewhat independent of

3360-518: The adult population at that time lacked suitable reading materials. They wrote, "For them, the enriching values of reading are denied unless materials reflecting adult interests are adapted to their needs." The poorest readers, one-sixth of the adult population, need "simpler materials for use in promoting functioning literacy and in establishing fundamental reading habits." In 1939, Irving Lorge published an article that reported other combinations of variables that indicate difficulty more accurately than

3444-468: The age of 13, Rubakin published many articles and books on science and many subjects for the great numbers of new readers throughout Russia. In Rubakin's view, the people were not fools. They were simply poor and in need of cheap books, written at a level they could grasp. The earliest reading ease assessment is the subjective judgment termed text leveling . Formulas do not fully address the various content, purpose, design, visual input, and organization of

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3528-467: The available new media for mass communications, especially television . Richards elaborated on an approach to literary criticism in The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) which embodied aspects of the scientific approach from his study of psychology, particularly that of Charles Scott Sherrington . In The Principles of Literary Criticism , Richards discusses

3612-647: The basis for their interpretive methodology. Readability Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text . The concept exists in both natural language and programming languages though in different forms. In natural language , the readability of text depends on its content (the complexity of its vocabulary and syntax ) and its presentation (such as typographic aspects that affect legibility , like font size , line height , character spacing , and line length ). In programming , things such as programmer comments , choice of loop structure, and choice of names can determine

3696-516: The best indicators of reading ease. He showed that the measures of reading ease worked as well for adults as for children. The same things that children find hard are the same for adults of the same reading levels. He also developed several new measures of cutoff scores. One of the most well known was the Mean Cloze Formula , which was used in 1981 to produce the Degree of Reading Power system used by

3780-450: The closer writing is to speech, the more clear and effective the content becomes. In 1889 in Russia, the writer Nikolai A. Rubakin published a study of over 10,000 texts written by everyday people. From these texts, he took 1,500 words he thought most people understood. He found that the main blocks to comprehension are unfamiliar words and long sentences . Starting with his own journal at

3864-522: The creation of Voice of America 's Learning English for news broadcasting, and Simplified Technical English , another English-based controlled language designed to write technical manuals. What survives of Ogden's Basic English is the basic 850-word list used as the beginner's vocabulary of the English language taught worldwide, especially in Asia. Ogden tried to simplify English while keeping it normal for native speakers, by specifying grammar restrictions and

3948-484: The criterion books. It was also the first to introduce the variable of interest to the concept of readability. Between 1929 and 1939, Alfred Lewerenz of the Los Angeles School District published several new formulas. In 1934, educational psychologist Edward Thorndike of Columbia University noted that, in Russia and Germany, teachers used word frequency counts to match books to students. Word skill

4032-511: The degree of reading ease for each kind of reading. The best level for classroom "assisted reading" is a slightly difficult text that causes a "set to learn", and for which readers can correctly answer 50% of the questions of a multiple-choice test. The best level for unassisted reading is one for which readers can correctly answer 80% of the questions. These cutoff scores were later confirmed by Vygotsky and Chall and Conard. Among other things, Bormuth confirmed that vocabulary and sentence length are

4116-532: The early research, which was later taken up by textbook publishers. In 1921, Harry D. Kitson published The Mind of the Buyer , one of the first books to apply psychology to marketing. Kitson's work showed that each type of reader bought and read their own type of text. On reading two newspapers and two magazines, he found that short sentence length and short word length were the best contributors to reading ease. In 1923, Bertha A. Lively and Sidney L. Pressey published

4200-409: The ease with which humans can read computer program code . Higher readability in a text eases reading effort and speed for the general population of readers. For those who do not have high reading comprehension , readability is necessary for understanding and applying a given text. Techniques to simplify readability are essential to communicate a set of information to the intended audience. Whether it

4284-452: The education and experience of the staffs writers. " In 1948, Flesch published his Reading Ease formula in two parts. Rather than using grade levels, it used a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 equivalent to the 12th grade and 100 equivalent to the 4th grade. It dropped the use of affixes. The second part of the formula predicts human interest by using personal references and the number of personal sentences. The new formula correlated 0.70 with

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4368-568: The establishment of the literary methodology of New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). Richards was born in Sandbach . He was educated at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge , where his intellectual talents were developed by

4452-415: The first reading ease formula. They were concerned that junior high school science textbooks had so many technical words and that teachers would spend all class time explaining these words. They argued that their formula would help to measure and reduce the "vocabulary burden" of textbooks. Their formula used five variable inputs and six constants. For each thousand words, it counted the number of unique words,

4536-523: The importance of organization, coherence, and emphasis in good writing. In the 1880s, English professor L. A. Sherman found that the English sentence was getting shorter. In Elizabethan times, the average sentence was 50 words long while in Sherman's modern time, it was 23 words long. Sherman's work established that: Sherman wrote: "No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk..." He wrote this wanting to emphasize that

4620-426: The limits of the reading ease formulas, some research looked at ways to measure the content, organization, and coherence of text. Although this did not improve the reliability of the formulas, their efforts showed the importance of these variables in reading ease. Studies by Walter Kintch and others showed the central role of coherence in reading ease, mainly for people learning to read. In 1983, Susan Kemper devised

4704-455: The mechanics of formulating arguments and with conflict; instead, he proposed the New Rhetoric to study the meaning of the parts of discourse, as "a study of misunderstanding and its remedies" to determine how language works. That ambiguity is expected, and that meanings (denotation and connotation) are not inherent to words, but are inherent to the perception of the reader, the listener, and

4788-485: The military, medicine, and business. The two publications with the largest circulations, TV Guide (13 million) and Reader's Digest (12 million), are written at the 9th-grade level. The most popular novels are written at the 7th-grade level. This supports the fact that the average adult reads at the 9th-grade level. It also shows that, for recreation, people read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level. For centuries, teachers and educators have seen

4872-591: The number of words not on the Thorndike list, and the median index number of the words found on the list. Manually, it took three hours to apply the formula to a book. After the Lively–Pressey study, people looked for formulas that were more accurate and easier to apply. In 1928, Carleton Washburne and Mabel Vogel created the first modern readability formula. They validated it by using an outside criterion, and correlated .845 with test scores of students who read and liked

4956-428: The ones Gray and Leary used. His research also showed that, "The vocabulary load is the most important concomitant of difficulty." In 1944, Lorge published his Lorge Index , a readability formula that used three variables and set the stage for simpler and more reliable formulas that followed. By 1940, investigators had: In 1943, Rudolf Flesch published his PhD dissertation, Marks of a Readable Style , which included

5040-469: The opportunity to expound upon his cybernetic concept of "feedforward". The Oxford English Dictionary records that Richards coined the term feedforward in 1951 at the Eighth Macy Conferences on cybernetics . In the event, the term extended the intellectual and critical influence of Richards to cybernetics which applied the term in a variety of contexts. Moreover, among Richards' students

5124-452: The preface of the 1959 reprint: "It [World War II] was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language that now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful." In his story " Gulf ", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used

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5208-693: The principles of aesthetic reception , the bases of the literary theory of “harmony”; aesthetic understanding derives from the balance of competing psychological impulses. The structure of the Foundations of Aesthetics —a survey of the competing definitions of the term æsthetic —prefigures the multiple-definitions work in the books Basic Rules of Reason (1933), Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934) II. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of

5292-499: The reading ease of other texts, a method now called scaling . He showed that even though these factors cannot be measured, they cannot be ignored. Also in 1934, Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale published the first adult reading ease formula based on passages on health topics from a variety of textbooks and magazines. Of 29 factors that are significant for young readers, they found ten that are significant for adults. They used three of these in their formula. In 1935, William S. Gray of

5376-404: The reading records of more than 30,000 who read and were tested on 950,000 books. They found that three variables give the most reliable measure of text reading ease: They also found that: Beginning in the 1970s, cognitive theorists began teaching that reading is really an act of thinking and organization. The reader constructs meaning by mixing new knowledge into existing knowledge. Because of

5460-519: The scholar Charles Hicksonn 'Cabby' Spence. He began his career without formal training in literature; he studied philosophy (the "moral sciences") at Cambridge University , from which derived his assertions that, in the 20th century, literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialisation, in and of itself, but studied alongside a cognate field, such as philosophy , psychology or rhetoric . His early teaching appointments were as adjunct faculty: at Cambridge, Magdalene College would not pay

5544-413: The self-reported critical interpretations of university students. To that end, effective critical work required a closer aesthetic interpretation of the literary text as an object. To substantiate interpretive criticism, Richards provided theories of metaphor , value , and tone , of stock response, incipient action, and pseudo-statement; and of ambiguity . This last subject, the theory of ambiguity ,

5628-524: The short-term rather than drilling words and meanings teachers hope will stick. The incidental learning tactic is meant to help learners build comprehension and learning skills rather than memorizing words. Through this strategy, students would hopefully be able to navigate various levels of readability using context clues and comprehension. During the recession of the 1930s, the U.S. government invested in adult education . In 1931, Douglas Waples and Ralph Tyler published What Adults Want to Read About. It

5712-401: The subjects of form , value , rhythm , coenesthesia (an awareness of inhabiting one's body, caused by stimuli from various organs), literary infectiousness, allusiveness , divergent readings, and belief . He starts from the premise that "A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive." Practical Criticism (1929),

5796-533: The test, but keep us safe from the Evil One. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. Ivor Richards Ivor Armstrong Richards CH (26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979 ), known as I. A. Richards ,

5880-825: The type of audience to whom one is presenting a certain type of content to. For example, a technical writer might focus on clear and concise language and formatting that allows easy-reading. In contrast, a scholarly journal would use sophisticated writing that would appeal and make sense to the type of audience to whom they are directing information. Readability is essential to the clarity and accessibility of texts used in classrooms, work environments, and everyday life. The government prioritizes readability as well through Plain Language Laws which enforces important documents to be written at an 8th grade level. Much research has focused on matching prose to reading skill, resulting in formulas for use in research, government, teaching, publishing,

5964-412: The viewer. By their usages, compiled from experience, people decide and determine meaning by "how words are used in a sentence", in spoken and written language. Richards and Ogden created the semantic triangle to deliver an improved understanding of how words come to mean. The semantic triangle has three parts, the symbol or word, the referent, and the thought or reference. In the bottom, right corner

6048-519: The vocabulary burden of textbooks. This was the last of the early formulas that used the Thorndike vocabulary-frequency list. Until computers came along, word frequency lists were the best aids for grading reading ease of texts. In 1981 the World Book Encyclopedia listed the grade levels of 44,000 words. A popular strategy amongst educators in modern times is "incidental vocabulary learning," which enforces efficiency in learning vocabulary in

6132-402: The wire-service stories, the lower group got two-thirds more readers, and among local stories, 75% more readers. Feld also believed in drilling writers in Flesch's clear-writing principles. Both Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning worked extensively with newspapers and the wire services in improving readability. Mainly through their efforts in a few years, the readability of US newspapers went from

6216-548: The word lists by regular plurals of nouns, regular forms of the past tense of verbs, progressive forms of verbs etc. In 1948, he incorporated this list into a formula he developed with Jeanne S. Chall , who later founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory. In 1995, Dale and Chall published a new version of their formula with an upgraded word list, the New Dale–Chall readability formula. The Spache readability formula

6300-547: The world and establishing a totalitarian world government . In the future world of Wells' vision, virtually all members of humanity know this language. From 1942 to 1944 George Orwell was a proponent of Basic English, but in 1945 he became critical of universal languages . Basic English later inspired his use of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four . Evelyn Waugh criticized his own 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited , which he had previously called his magnum opus, in

6384-420: Was Marshall McLuhan , who also applied and developed the term and the concept of feedforward. According to Richards, feedforward is the concept of anticipating the effect of one's words by acting as our own critic. It is thought to work in the opposite direction of feedback, though it works essentially towards the same goal: to clarify unclear concepts. Existing in all forms of communication, feedforward acts as

6468-467: Was a two-year study of adult reading interests. Their book showed not only what people read but what they would like to read. They found that many readers lacked suitable reading materials: they would have liked to learn but the reading materials were too hard for them. Lyman Bryson of Teachers College, Columbia University found that many adults had poor reading ability due to poor education. Even though colleges had long tried to teach how to write in

6552-416: Was an English educator, literary critic , poet, and rhetorician . His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism , a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry , in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object . Richards' intellectual contributions to

6636-480: Was awarded a permanent post as a university lecturer. In the 1929–30 biennium, as a visiting professor, he taught Basic English and Poetry at Tsinghua University , Beijing. In the 1936–38 triennium, he was the director of the Orthological Institute of China. Eventually tiring of academic life at Cambridge, in 1939 he accepted an offer to teach in the school of education at Harvard University . Appointed

6720-710: Was developed in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), by William Empson , a former student of Richards'; moreover, additional to The Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism , Empson's book on ambiguity became the third foundational document for the methodology of the New Criticism . To Richards, literary criticism was impressionistic , too abstract to be readily grasped and understood, by most readers; and he proposed that literary criticism could be precise in communicating meanings, by way of denotation and connotation. To establish critical precision, Richards examined

6804-502: Was developed in 1952. In 1963, while teaching English teachers in Uganda, Edward Fry developed his Readability Graph . It became one of the most popular formulas and easiest to apply. The automated readability index was developed in 1967. Harry McLaughlin determined that word length and sentence length should be multiplied rather than added as in other formulas. In 1969, he published his SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) formula. It

6888-577: Was his most important learned concept. Richards served as a mentor and teacher to other prominent critics, most notably William Empson and F. R. Leavis , although Leavis was contemporary with Richards, and Empson was much younger. Other critics primarily influenced by his writings included Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate . Later critics who refined the formalist approach to New Criticism by actively rejecting his psychological emphasis included, besides Brooks and Tate, John Crowe Ransom , W. K. Wimsatt , R. P. Blackmur , and Murray Krieger . R. S. Crane of

6972-417: Was one of the first critics of Thorndike's vocabulary-frequency lists. He claimed that they did not distinguish between the different meanings that many words have. He created two new lists of his own. One, his "short list" of 769 easy words, was used by Irving Lorge in his formula. The other was his "long list" of 3,000 easy words, which were understood by 80% of fourth-grade students. However, one has to extend

7056-412: Was the best sign of intellectual development, and the strongest predictor of reading ease. In 1921, Thorndike published Teachers Word Book , which contained the frequencies of 10,000 words. He also published his readability formula. He wrote that word skills can be increased if the teacher introduces new words and repeats them often. In 1939, W.W. Patty and W. I Painter published a formula for measuring

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