Americana: Relative Readability

The strange story of federal grants for strange studies goes on. In last week's installment, University of Virginia English Professor Eric D. Hirsch received $137,935 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a standard for judging the "relative readability" of writing.

Over the next year, Hirsch will employ eleven graduate students who will rewrite a series of student papers and supposedly make them easier to understand. The original papers and the rewrites will then be given to separate groups of readers who will be timed on how fast they read the two versions. "A text's intrinsic effectiveness is the...

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