Challenging Text
to answer the question, What do we
mean when we say that a text is difficult? Readability formulas usually
answer this question by measuring two
factors: challenging vocabulary and
long, complex sentences. Here we look
at these factors along with several others
that also affect readers’ ability to comprehend text.
Vocabulary If you ask students what makes reading hard, they blame the words. And
they’re right to place so much impor-
tance on vocabulary: Authors introduce
their ideas through words and phrases,
and if readers don’t know what these
mean, there’s little chance that they will
make sense of the text. Studies show
that higher-order thinking in reading
depends heavily on knowledge of word
meanings. 1
Sentence Structure
Words are not the whole picture. Sen-
tence structure matters, too, because
it determines how the words operate
together. Thus, understanding the
sentence “The stork was walking in the
beautiful cornfield” requires more than
just being able to define individual
words. The sentence must also tell the
reader how the ideas expressed by these
words fit together (Which stork? Where
was the stork? What was it doing?). If
the text instead said, “Stork beautiful
the walking in was the cornfield,” all the
same ideas would have been presented,
yet readers would not understand the
meaning.
If you ask students what
makes reading hard,
they blame the words.
for example, tend to be easier to read
than longer sentences; presumably, they
put less demand on the reader’s working
memory. Longer sentences are likely
to include multiple phrases or clauses,
so they tend to include more ideas that
have to be related to one another. They
also have a greater density (longer noun
or verb phrases) and more embedding
(more complex relationships).
Authors construct such complicated
sentences for a variety of reasons. In
some cases, complex sentence structures are necessary to communicate the
complexity of the information itself—
thus the long noun phrases common
in science. In literary passages, long-sentence writers like William Faulkner
or Evelyn Waugh may be trying to get
readers to slow down and explore the
architecture of the thoughts and feelings
