March 2020
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Text Difficulty: A Primer for Instructional Designers

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Have you thought about text difficulty in your learning program? Text difficulty doesn’t refer to the complexity of your topic; rather, it refers to how easy or hard a text is to read. Researchers have identified two main factors that influence text difficulty: readability and cohesion.

Readability deals with vocabulary and sentence complexity. A highly readable text uses common words and relatively short, simple sentences. A text with low readability, on the other hand, uses rare words or

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