Revising texts to increase or decrease a readability score expressed as a grade level has its problems. This thankless job requires word by word, sentence by sentence editing for syntactic simplicity or complexity without changing meaning. Doing the job assumes the writer takes on three challenges: 1) varying word length, 2) varying sentence length, and 3) preserving meaning. Note the first two are verified by way of simple counting. The third is inherently subjective even in the most objective genres, according to discourse theorists like Foucault, James Fairclough, and James Gee.
“No matter how much scientists pretend to bracket and set aside all biases, literacy is enacted in human cultures.”
This sentence packs the perfect punch for encapsulating the ongoing debate.
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