back to the Publication Alerts menuGiles, Timothy D., and Brian Still. "A Syntactic Approach to Readability." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 35, no. 1 (2005): 47-70.
Giles and Still argue that the Golub Syntactic Density formula has much to offer researchers who assess readability. Unlike commonly used readability measures based on the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word, the Golub Syntactic Density formula attends to syntactic text features such as clause length, the number of prepositional phrases, and the number of "adverbs of time" (e.g., when, then, once, while). Giles and Still suggest that in comparison to traditional approaches, syntactic approaches offer relatively more valid assessments of readability.