The author identifies some of the persistent questions raised by people in education, business,
and government who want to judge how well their texts are working. She compares the …

The primary purpose of this chapter is to present a new model of the revision process in written
composition-a model based on the results of thinking-aloud protocol studies. We proceed …

Research problem: Interest in plain-language communication has been growing in many
sectors of business and government, but knowledge about its development is scattered and in …

Document designers have been asking some difficult questions about quality—particularly
about how to recognize a quality document, describe its features, and measure its value. This …

Planning in writing is a strategic response to both the writing situation and the writer's own
knowledge. This paper describes a process adult writers bring to illdefined expository tasks, …

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension
needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' …

Critics of the" plain language movement" point out that what is" plain" to one audience may
mystify and confuse another. Questions such as" Plain language for whom?" and" How can …

While readability formulas were intended as a quick benchmark for indexing readabilty, they
are inherently unreliable: they depend on criterion (calibration) passages too short to reflect …

What Are We Doing as a Research Community? 273 rhetors such as Gorgias. While uncovering
the evidence to create case histories of Gorgias' thinking can place one in a position to …

Although methods for evaluating the quality of documents have existed since the 1930s, the
document design community has attended most seriously to the theory and practice of …