Improving the readability of scientific articles

How are these events interlinked? Well, Chall and Conard examine the difficulty of school textbooks in America and ask whether textbooks have got easier over the last twenty years or so; and, if so, whether this may have contributed to the acknowledged decline in American university students’ verbal ability scores. The authors’ answers to these over-simple questions are complex. But that is not the point. Here I want to point to the paradox that Chall and Conard weave a fascinating series of difficult arguments in elegantly simple prose. It is the issues that are complex: the text itself is not. It is this aspect of difficulty-the content-that often eludes Chall and Conard when they discuss in detail changes in the formula-based readability scores of the textbooks that they examine.