Introduction Older men are at increased risk for prostate cancer. As seniors turn to the Internet for cancer information, it is important that the resources they locate about lifestyle behaviors and screening are culturally appropriate and easy to understand. This study was a comprehensive analysis of prostate cancer risk as portrayed on the Internet with assessment of content readability and c...

OBJECTIVE Tympanostomy tube (TT) placement is common in children; however, family-centeredness and utility of online information used for decision making and understanding is unknown. We evaluate the quality of leading Internet resources describing TT placement. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional descriptive design. METHODS We performed a Google (Menlo Park, CA) search for terms related to TTs. W...

BACKGROUND Weight management education is one of the key strategies to assist patients to manage their weight. Educational resources provide an important adjunct in the chain of communication between practitioners and patients. However, one in five Australian adults has low health literacy. The purpose of this study was to assess the readability and analyse the content of weight management reso...

OBJECTIVE Informed consent forms that are used prior to administering anaesthesia inform patients before any proposed surgical procedure or treatment. They should provide patients with sufficient information about the operation and treatment. Readibility refers to whether it is easy or hard for a reader to read and understand an available text, and this is evaluated via various formulas. The ai...

STUDY DESIGN Descriptive. BACKGROUND Dupuytren's contracture is a common disorder involving fibrosis of the palmar fascia. As patients are increasingly using online materials to gather health care information, it is imperative to assess the readability and appropriateness of this content. The recommended grade level for patient educational materials is seventh to eighth grade according to the...

samples of participants’ writing were scored by two raters using toefl writing scoring rubric. the readability index of each text was calculated through the use of six readability formulae and graphs, i.e., flesch-kincaid index, reading ease index, fog index, smog formula, fry’s graph, and dale-chall readability index. the scores given to each essay were later compared to the obtained readabili...

In this paper we describe a method for simplifying sentences using Phrase Based Machine Translation, augmented with a re-ranking heuristic based on dissimilarity, and trained on a monolingual parallel corpus. We compare our system to a word-substitution baseline and two state-of-the-art systems, all trained and tested on paired sentences from the English part of Wikipedia and Simple Wikipedia. ...

This study presents the results of an initial phase of a project seeking to convert texts into a more accessible form for people with autism spectrum disorders by means of text simplification technologies. Random samples of Simple Wikipedia articles are compared with texts from News, Health, and Fiction genres using four standard readability indices (Kincaid, Flesch, Fog and SMOG) and sixteen l...

I examine the role of CEO speaking style on market valuation of their firms. Analyzing and quantifying the speaking style of CEOs using Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, a measure of speech sophistication, I find that verbal ability is correlated to the education levels of CEOs. I also find that after controlling for industry specific differences in CEO speaking style, the market places a higher valu...