Abstract:

Although we may have entered the era of the microchip, the bulk of communications initiated by corporations and government departments are still print communications. Billions of such communications are issued every year. They are often not as efficient as they should be. A number of corporate advertisements were analysed for reading difficulty. The measure used (described below) gives a text a score: the higher the score the more difficult the text is to read. The readability of the corporate advertisements was assessed by relating their scores to those of two newspapers - the Daily Mirror, the simplest of our mass circulation daily newspapers, and the Guardian, which is probably the most difficult.