Rules for Comprehensible Technical Prose: a Survey of the Psycholinguistic Literature

Computerized systems that provide feedback on the comprehensibility of technical prose should be based on what is known scientifically about what makes prose difficult to understand. The experimental psycholinguistics literature was surveyed, and a set of rules for comprehensible technical prose was derived. The basic criteria for selection of the literature and the rules was that the rules should be applicable by an automatic system without needing deep knowledge of the domain. Rather, the rules should address the surface structure of sentences and text, and the semantic content at a "shallow" level, defined in terms of the propositional representation for the text content. Many rules for good sentence syntax, coherence, text organization, and amount of content are proposed and justified by the experimental literature. The major gaps in the empirical literature are described in a concluding section. This report was scanned and/or retyped at ONR and may have typographical errors not in the original text. It uses underlining where more modern documents would use italics. It was not published other than as a technical report.