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TR 41. Evaluating Text Quality: The Continuum from Text-Focused to Reader-Focused Methods
By: Karen A. Schriver
Publication: National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy Technical Report
Date: March 1990
Summary: Schriver discusses three methods for evaluating text quality: text-focused, expert-judgment-focused, and reader-focused. She concludes that reader-focused approaches offer the best opportunity for detecting problems in a text.
Excerpt
We frequently read texts by writers who fail to consider our needs as readers. Writers may forget to provide a necessary context, fail to include examples, obscure the purpose, leave out critical information, or write too abstractly. Writers of all ages from almost every profession share two questions: How can we anticipate and meet the reader's needs? How can we know if we were successful? Writers have been found to have genuine difficulty both in considering the reader's needs while planning and generating text as well as in judging their success during revision. Thus, it is not surprising that people in education, business, the health professions, and government have been looking for reliable ways to evaluate the quality of texts they create.
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