Measuring Effective Writing

Abstract

In this study of expert use of anaphoric “this,” six history textbook passages written by composition instructors, text linguists, and professional editors are submitted to cloze procedure for comprehensive analysis. Discrepancies in the predictability of content and function words pinpoint examples of ineffective anaphoric expressions using “this” as a demonstrative pronoun (“unattended this”) or “this” as a demonstrative adjective introducing a noun phrase (“attended this”). The analysis indicates that (a) current stylistic guidelines proscribing unattended “this” are overstated and (b) attended “this” is best employed when synonyms for the antecedent and descriptive adjectives are used to provide the reader new information about the referent. The study's information theory perspective leads to the further generalization that effective written communication is often syntactically predictable and semantically not.