EVALUATION OF TEXTUAL READABILITY ? AN ANALYSIS OF ITS VARYING APPROACHES

Readability, as opposed to legibility is the ease with which we read and understand a particular written text. This paper takes into consideration the two different approaches to analyze the readability of written texts ? the quantitative and qualitative analysis through a survey of subjective testing which involves the analysis of a number of reader characteristics such as degree of knowledge and interest in the subject researches on readability. The quantitative analysis focuses on textspecific objective testing which is solely based on linguistic factors such as word and sentence length which can be easily measured and quantified by using readability formulas. Qualitative analysis focuses on reader-specific, motivation, familiarity of the theme, etc. Detail analysis reveal that along with vocabulary and sentence structure, the reader’s reading ability, prior knowledge, familiarity, interest and expertise on the subject or related field in which the text is written are powerful contributors to determine text readability.