Clarity, conciseness, and cohesion: readability principles and metrics applied to information science graduate students’ text

Abstract

Introduction: The language barrier makes it difficult to publish in English, even when there is scientific merit, as the problem starts in Portuguese, in the difficulty of following scientific writing principles. What is the impact of applying principles of clarity, conciseness, and cohesion in the extension and readability of scientific texts? This research aimed to verify this impact when comparing extension and readability indicators before and after applying those principles. Method: Twenty-five Information Science graduate students annotated their own scientific text and that of three colleagues, in a double-blind review, indicating writing style problems of four types: unnecessary word, excessive subject-verb distance, excessive nominalization, and late contextualization. Each author then reworked their own text to solve the problems. The original and reworked texts were compared in length and Flesch Reading Ease score. Original and reworked texts from the literature were also compared, as a reference. Results: All texts were shortened after rework, although annotations were directed most to grammatical problems than to the four style problems. There were 13 increases, 2 maintenance, and 10 decreases in the readability scores. This result is compatible with the benchmark study with texts from the literature. Conclusions: Applying readability principles improves conciseness but, in accordance with the literature, has a dubious impact on the readability score. Compared translatability remains an open research topic, to verify the assumption that applying the principles equates to "write in English in Portuguese".