Readability and Word Length - Book Report/Review Example

Introduction In today's computer-age where anything and everything relies on the Internet and its related media, we can easily say that the reader-ship of different newspapers/magazines has come down to a significant extent. Hence, it has been a challenge for different newspapers/magazines around the world to sustain in the competition and in order to do that, come out with innovative ways of improving readability of their periodicals from time to time. It isn't surprising to find these periodicals compete amongst each other, not just with respect to their content, but also other aspects, especially the design and typography. I find it apt at this juncture to bring out the key differences between the magazines and newspapers. In traditional typography, text is composed to create a readable, coherent, and visually satisfying whole that works invisibly, without the awareness of the reader. Even distribution with a minimum of distractions and anomalies are aimed at producing clarity and transparency. It can be easily guessed that Readability is the motivating factor towards better typography and hence, better organization of the words to enable clarity. Choice of font and size is perhaps the primary aspect of text typography. Editorial, educational, religious, scientific, spiritual and commercial writings all have differing characteristics and requirements. For historic material, established text typefaces are frequently chosen according to a scheme of historical genres acquired by a long process of accretion, with considerable overlap between historical periods. The text layout, tone or colour of set matter interplay the text with white spaces of the page and other graphic elements. Size also plays a significant role in the presentation style of the given matter. Headlines are always represented with greater size, depending on the importance of the news. This decision of what size should be used should be taken carefully after deciding the importance of the news. The size and the font of the news, if used properly, can enhance readability to a great extent and can probably go a long way in boosting the sales of the newspaper or magazine. The note worthy differences between magazines and newspapers are as given under on various aspects. Content- While the content in magazines usually deals with summary information from various researches around the world, current scandals and issues which concern the world at that point of time, the newspapers majorly act as interpreters between the Government and the people. While the content in magazines is purely based on the observations, perceptions and the inferences drawn by the writer, articles in the newspapers absolutely give no scope for individual comprehensions and perceptions. In other words, Newspapers directly report the incidents without any sort of human interpretation in between. The Diction- While the magazines are relatively plain and easy to understand, the newspapers are usually found to use more of jargon with a lot of twists in the narration. This clearly illustrates that the magazines are clearly more readable than the newspapers with respect to the diction. Authors- the authors who generally write for magazines are hired writers and noted journalists who are given the freedom to interpret various incidents and predict/forecast the trend depending on the current situation. The articles in the magazines can be said to be personal interpretations of the circumstances outside and are usually done by eminent personalities in the fields of journalism, writing. The documentation in the magazines involves absolutely no citations usually but the documentation in the newspapers includes complete citations with all the sources mentioned. Graphics- the magazines are loaded with a lot of pictures, graphics and also loaded with lots of colorful advertisements. This makes the magazines much more readable and user friendly than the newspapers, which are usually filled with less pictures and are not usually colored unlike the magazines. The Ergonomics- coming to the ergonomics aspect, it can be clearly said that the magazines score on the newspapers by a significant margin. It is a well-known fact that carrying and positioning a magazine is much easier than the newspapers. It is much more convenient and attractive than the newspapers. Also, the special pages used in the magazines make it much more convenient to hold and read. Examples of famous magazines include Time, Redbook, and the Rolling Stone. The New York Times, the Washington Post is two of the famous newspapers having great reader-ship in the world today. Another important difference is the style of presentation. In the newspapers, the place, time of the incident needs to be reported before the actual briefing of the incident, which need not be the case with magazines. Literature Review In this dissertation, we look into how the readability gets affected with the length of the word. We do this by comparing the standard word lengths in the magazines and the newspapers. In order to establish this, we take a passage of 100 words from magazines and the newspapers and then compare randomly as to which one has less word size. It can be inferred easily that a passage with less word lengths will always be more readable and can be comprehended easily than a passage with more word lengths. The above-mentioned need not be taken as a default statement always, but we take it as the cornerstone of our research with respect to drawing conclusions. Initially, a hypothesis is formed basing on the initial observations and further research in undertaken in order to prove it. Hypothesis- The word length in magazines is much lesser than the word length in newspapers. The above shall be the point to prove at the end of the dissertation. In this case, we take up case studies of various magazines and newspapers in order to establish the article. Lets take up an example of a sample newspaper article and analyze it. (Washington Post, 2001) The above newspaper article is about home networking, which clearly is a direct, reporting of whatever Mr. Catherine Lisinnicchia had said about the current necessities of home networking. As all the facts have to be reported correctly and there is absolutely no scope for any sort of individual comprehensions coming into picture, we can clearly infer that more amount of jargon is used in the style of narration and not always can a man with moderate levels of understanding of English can understand the intentions of the writer. On the other hand, let us take a sample article in a magazine. (Visual Arts, 2002) It can be easily seen from the above sample magazine article that articles in magazines are much more colorful and hence, readability is increased. However, we yet are to ascertain at this point of time whether the word length in magazines is less than the usual word length in the newspapers. In order to establish this fact, we taken sample passages containing almost equal number of words and compare both of them. The above figure shows a random sample we take from the paper Washington Post that was published sometime during 1997. As can be seen from the passage, a lot of jargon has been used with respect to the style of presentation, which automatically increases the length of the words used in the passage. Hence, this difference in presentation is the most crucial aspect of our research. We now take a random sample passage from middle of the text from the famous magazine, the Time during the same year 1997 (Time, 1997) Hence, it can be clearly inferred that the simplicity in the style of presentation and the user-friendly language has made magazines the more readable and the newspapers; this, infact has been the major reason behind the shorter length of the words in the magazines than in the newspapers. Hence, it can be concluded that the intensity of jargon used in the newspapers affect the readability directly and hence, will actually increase the size of the words being used. This is in accordance with the default assumption before the formation of the hypothesis that the lesser the number of words, more is the readability and hence, more the length of the words. Hence, the above hypothesis, which says that the size of words used in magazines is smaller than those used in newspapers, is successfully established through case studies. To prove the hypothesis, we also take and analyze the spaces required in between the newspapers and magazines. For example, consider the following two articles given below as showing in the following figures "Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage ofthe World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet. In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs of dust: 1) the force of the collapsing upper floors raised the air pressure in the lower ones so dramatically that it actually blew out the windows. And 2) the towers did not collapse from the impact of two Boeing 767s and the ensuing fires. They were destroyed in a planned, controlled demolition. The dust puffs you see on film are the detonations of explosives planted there before the attacks. People who believe the second explanation live in a very different world from those who believe the first. In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. A commercial jet did not hit the Pentagon; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; a U.S. Air Force fighter deliberately took it down. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration. The population of world No. 2 is larger than you might think. A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. Although the mainstream media, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has largely ignored the 9/11 Truth Movement,, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy videos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001" The above article appeared a month after the devastating attacks on the twin towers on September 11th, 2001. Now, let us take a random paragraph from the above passage. I choose the following paragraph "People who believe the second explanation live in a very different world from those who believe the first. In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. A commercial jet did not hit the Pentagon; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; a U.S. Air Force fighter deliberately took it down. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration." The above-considered paragraph has around 117 words when counted. We now take the length of each word in the paragraph and add it over. The length here implies the number of characters in the word being considered. In the above given paragraph, the number of words (including spaces) were found to be 666 and characters without spaces were found to be 556. Assuming that commas would take up almost 6 characters, the average length of 550/117= 4.7 alphabetical characters per word. That means the average length of the above-considered paragraph comes to almost 4.7 alphabetical characters per word. When the whole article is considered, which has 410 words, and a total of 1950 characters, we get an average of 4.8 alphabetical characters per word. Consider the following news article, which appeared in the New York time the day after the attacks "Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York's World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count, but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious terror attack in American history. The attacks seemed carefully coordinated. The hijacked planes were all en route to California, and therefore gorged with fuel, and their departures were spaced within an hour and 40 minutes. The first, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston for Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower at 8:48 a.m. Eighteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175, also headed from Boston to Los Angeles, plowed into the south tower. Then an American Airlines Boeing 757, Flight 77, left Washington's Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles, but instead hit the western part of the Pentagon, the military headquarters where 24,000 people work, at 9:40 a.m. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco, crashed near Pittsburgh, raising the possibility that its hijackers had failed in whatever their mission was. There were indications that the hijackers on at least two of the planes were armed with knives. Attorney General John Ash croft told reporters in the evening that the suspects on Flight 11 were armed that way. And Barbara Olson, a television commentator who was traveling on American Flight 77, managed to reach her husband, Solicitor General Theodore Olson, by cell phone and to tell him that the hijackers were armed with knives and a box cutter. In all, 266 people perished in the four planes and several score more were known dead elsewhere. Numerous firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers who responded to the initial disaster in Lower Manhattan were killed or injured when the buildings collapsed. Hundreds were treated for cuts, broken bones, burns and smoke inhalation. But the real carnage was concealed for now by the twisted, smoking, ash-choked carcasses of the twin towers, in which thousands of people used to work on a weekday. The collapse of the towers caused another World Trade Center building to fall 10 hours later, and several other buildings in the area were damaged or aflame. ''I have a sense it's a horrendous number of lives lost,'' said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. ''Right now we have to focus on saving as many lives as possible.'' The mayor warned that ''the numbers are going to be very, very high.'' He added that the medical examiner's office would be ready ''to deal with thousands and thousands of bodies if they have to.'' For hours after the attacks, other buildings that threatened to topple stymied rescuers. But by 11 p.m., rescuers had been able to begin serious efforts to locate and remove survivors. Mr. Giuliani said two Port Authority police officers had been pulled from the ruins, and he said hope existed that more people could be saved. Earlier, police officer volunteers using dogs had found four bodies in the smoldering, stories-high pile of rubble where the towers had once stood and had taken them to a makeshift morgue in the lobby of an office building at Vesey and West Streets. Within an hour of the attacks, the United States was on a war footing. The military was put on the highest state of alert, National Guard units were called out in Washington and New York and two aircraft carriers were dispatched to New York harbor. President Bush remained aloft in Air Force One, following a secretive route and making only brief stopovers at Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before finally setting down in Washington at 7 p.m. His wife and daughters were evacuated to a secure, unidentified location Now consider the mean for the above article. We can calculate the number of unspaced characters to be 3881 and the number of words to me 645. Hence, the number of characters per word can be calculated to be 3881/645= 6.01 characters per word. This article has been taken on the day of emergency when the language used is relatively simpler. It is a well-known fact that on days when disasters or achievements are reported, the language used by the reporters is relatively simpler than on normal days. Hence, we can easily notice the differences in averages to be (6.01-4.8) which comes out to be 1.21 characters per word. Assuming that the increase in the length of words increases the complexity of the language used, it is clearly evident that magazines use relatively simpler language than the newspapers. Method 2 In this method, we assume that any reader is comfortable with a maximum word length of 5 words. We now calculate the percentage of words whose lengths are less than 5 in each of the articles. It was observed that in the case of the article which appeared in the magazine, which had 410 words, 222 were found to be less than 5 characters in length. Hence, the percentage of words less than 5 words in the case of the magazine is 222/410= .5414. Hence 54.14% of the words in the article, which appeared in the magazine, were found to be less than 5 words. Coming to the case of the newspaper, which had 645 words, 292 words were found to be of length less than 5 characters. Hence, the ratio of words less than 5 characters to total number of words can be found to be .4523. Hence, only 45.23% of the words in the newspaper article are less than 5 characters. The results obtained in the above calculations can be shown graphically as follows: The Spacers Problem This problem involves the arrangement of spacers with different shapes in between the tiles of the considered configuration. The shapes of the spacers used in this particular problem are L, T and + respectively. In this particular scenario, we take into consideration the shape of the area in between the tiles. For example, consider the following figure below X Y W U V D E F G T C L K H S B A M J I R N O P Q The following point wise configuration shows how the installation is done at different points in the setup: A- L shaped spacer B- T-shaped spacer C- T- shaped spacer D- L-shaped spacer E- + Shaped spacer F- + Shaped spacer G- + Shaped spacer H- + Shaped spacer I- + Shaped spacer J- + Shaped spacer K- + Shaped spacer L- + Shaped spacer M- + Shaped spacer N- T shaped spacer O- T-shaped spacer P- T shaped spacer Q- L-shaped spacer R- T-shaped spacer S- T-shaped spacer T- T-shaped spacer U- T-shaped spacer V- L-shaped spacer W- T-shaped spacer X- T-shaped spacer Y- T-shaped spacer The total number of different spacers used for the above particular installation is L-shaped 4 T-shaped - 12 + Shaped spacers- 9 Assume that the above figure represents tiles of 4*4 configuration. In this particular figure, let us now examine as to how the particular spacers can fit into the distances between the tiles. As can be easily inferred, the L shaped spacers can be put up at the edges of the tiles, which have no surrounding tiles to the left or right. For example, in the above given figure, at the point A, we can install an L-shaped spacer. Similarly at the point B, there can be a T-shaped spacer as there is one tile above that point and no tiles to the left of it. Similarly, + shaped spacers can be put up at the points E, F, G, L, K, H, M, J, I since the points are completely surrounded by 4 tiles completely. Now lets us investigate this further by taking more shapes and investigate the pattern of the number of the spacers used. In this particular example, we take the example of a tile setup with 3*3 configuration. We can assume it to be as follows: I H G N A D E O B C F P J K L M In this particular configuration, we need 4 L-spacers, 8 T-spacers, and four + spacers. The point wise setup for this installation is as follows A- T-spacer B- T-Spacer C- + Spacer D- +Spacer E- +Spacer F- +Spacer G- T shaped H- T-shaped I- L spacer J- L-spacer K- T-shaped L- T-shaped M- L-shaped N- L-shaped O- T-shaped P- T-shaped The number of spacers of different shapes that have been used in the above installation can be summed up as T-spacers - 8 L-spacers- 4 + Spacers- 4 Let us now consider a simple 2*2 setup as shown below in the following figure A D G B E H C F I In this case, the point wise installation will be as follows A- L-spacer B- T- spacer C- L spacer D- T-spacer E- + Spacer F- T spacer G- L spacer H- T spacer I- L spacer The number of different spacers is as follows L-spacers- 4 T-spacers- 4 + Spacers- 1 Let us now try to deduce the pattern of the spacers required for the configurations described above The following table summarizes the results obtained T- spacers L-spacers + Spacers 2*2 4 4 1 3*3 8 4 4 4*4 12 4 9 Hence, as can be deduced from above, for a tile with configuration of (n*n), the number of T-spacers required is 4*(n-1). The number of L spacers required will always be 4 since the number of squares having only 2 adjacent squares in any configuration will always be 4. The number of + spacers requires for a tile configuration of (n*n) will be the squared value of (n-1) that is (n-1)^2. Now let us consider the following tile configuration as below: A D B E F J O C G K N H I L M The number of spacers required for the above set up is L-shaped - 4 +-Shaped- 4 T- shaped- 8 In the case of rectangles present in (m*n) format, we can generalist the number of different spacers to be as following L-shaped -4 + Shaped- (m-1)* (n-1) T-shaped- 2* (m+n-2) RESOURCES 1) Washington Post(1997), Article on state of the Mental Health medication available at http://www.sheltersa.asn.au/Info/Mental%20Health%20Forum/media%20article%202.JPG 2) Visual Arts(200), Article on "Kanika" available at http://images.google.co.in/imgresimgurl=http://www.atkinsglobal.ie/images/learning_curve&imgrefurl=http://www.atkinsglobal.ie/business_areas/colleges_schools/national_development_malahide_community.php&h=1134&w=771&sz=277&hl=en&start=20&um=1&tbnid=jIWWPuHFoXFZDM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=102&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmagazine%2Barticle%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den 3) Washing post (2001), Article on Home networking available at http://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/dsarc/media/DSA_article.jpg 4) Time (1997), Article on Marlon Brando available at http://bigbugman.com/images/People_BBM_Article_7_15.jpg Read More