Letter Length Research Articles

Affective Disposition and the Letter of Reference

The present study attempted to determine the relationship between affective disposition and the favorability of letters of reference. We hypothesized that individuals with positive dispositions would write more favorable letters than would individuals with less positive or neutral dispositions. In addition, we also hypothesized that length of letter would partly mediate the relationship between affective disposition and letter favorability. To test these hypotheses, two studies were conducted. In order to present letter writers with a controlled stimulus, Study 1 entailed having 110 undergraduate students write letters of reference for two hypothetical job candidates in a laboratory setting. In order to test the generalizability of the laboratory study, Study 2 involved 95 faculty members who submitted three recent letters of reference they had written. Results showed that affective disposition was related to the favorability of letters of reference in both studies. Results also revealed that length of letter partly mediated the relationship between affective disposition and letter favorability.

The Utility of Item-Level Analyses in Model Evaluation: A Reply to Seidenberg and Plaut

Seidenberg and Plaut (this issue) argue that the implications of our analyses (Spieler & Balota, 1997) for the two extant connectionist models of word naming are limited by two factors. First, variables outside the scope of these models influence naming performance, so it is not surprising that the models do not account for much of the variance at the item level. Second, there is error variance associated with large item-level data sets that obviously should not be captured by these models. We point out that there are a number of variables that have been incorporated within the targeted connectionist models that should provide these models an advantage over the simple predictor variables that we selected as a baseline to evaluate the efficacy of the models (e.g., log frequency, length in letters, and number of orthographic neighbors). We also point out that there is considerable consistency across four large-scale studies of item means. Finally, we provide evidence that even under conditions of a standard word-naming study (with a small set of items), simple word frequency, orthographic neighborhoods, and length accounted for more variance than the extant connectionist models. We conclude that item-level analyses provide an important source of evidence in the evaluation of current models and the development of future models of visual word recognition.

Communication between GPs and psychiatrists: the long and short of it

Good communication between general practitioners (GPs) and psychiatrists is important. An audit of new patient referral letters from GPs and the first assessment letter in reply from psychiatrists found that GP letters were short (mean 106 words) with limited information which increased with letter length. Psychiatrist's letters were longer (mean 849 words), of a high quality but with a negative relationship between length and information score. Use of the ‘preferred’ format derived from previous research was associated with shorter letters of higher quality. Communication between GPs and psychiatrists might be improved if GPs wrote more and psychiatrists wrote less.

Distribution of word length in early modern English letters of Sir Philip Sidney*

Distribution of word length in early modern English letters of Sir Philip Sidney*

Distribution of word length in Ciceronian letters

Abstract This research is connected with the Göttingen word length project (Best & Zhu, 1994) and examines the frequency of occurence of words of different lengths in complete texts. The reason for that is the assumption that words of different lengths in texts don't occur chaotically but follow stochastic laws. Word length is measured in terms of the number of syllables. The criteria of “word”; and “syllable”; are the same as in Best & Zhu (1994, p. 20): “word”; is defined as an orthographic word (Bünting & Bergenholtz, 1989, p. 36f.), and the number of syllables is defined by the number of vowels in a word.

Direct-Mail Letters

This article uses a computerized style checker—RightWriter® 4.0—to analyze 14 direct-mail letters used to market books to a middle-class female audience. This study outlines methods for correlating stylistic traits with sales success. For this product and audience, letter effectiveness is enhanced by lowering readability levels, as well as by limiting the use of negative words and modifiers. In addition, writers for this audience should avoid words that are too easy or too difficult. However, no correlations emerged between success and letter length, strength of style, sentence length, or percentage of prepositions.

Lexical and nonlexical routes: a comparison between normally achieving and poor readers.

This study investigated qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Thirty-eight 9-year-old poor readers and forty 7- and 8-year-old reading-age-matched normally achieving readers from the United Kingdom were matched in phonemic processing and then given tests of memory span and visual discrimination of letter-like characters, were required to read different word types (regular, exception, and pseudoword), and were asked to complete a homophonic pseudoword test. The poor readers were worse at reading pseudowords compared to the controls, but this difference was unrelated to phonemic length of number of letters, or to the ease of producing analogies for the pseudowords. The results suggest that although there are no differences with reading-age controls in phonological processing, poor readers have worse grapheme-phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route when appropriate. The results also showed that poor readers were slightly better at visual discrimination but had poorer memory spans.

Editor's Comment

Editor's Comment This first issue of Theatre Topics begins a new tradition and yet another partnership in publishing between the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Theatre Topics will build upon the relationship established between the Press and ATHE through the publication of Theatre Journal. Theatre Topics is committed to publishing articles in the areas of Dramaturgy, Performance Studies, and Theatre Pedagogy. We will not be publishing theatre reviews or book reviews. Realizing that established ways of performing, studying and presenting our creative work must be re-examined, we will publish three types of articles: "Subject Articles" up to thirty typewritten pages; "Comments on Process," a section reserved for description of practical applications in the various aspects of theatre, under eight typewritten pages (See Assunta Kent's article in this issue); and "Responses" intended to promote a dialogue between universities and practitioners, letter length. We ask our colleagues and readers to utilize this journal as a tool for establishing an on-going dialogue among theatre practitioners / artists / teachers. Theatre Topics will serve as a vehicle for discussion and comment on our art, our teaching and our past, present, and future creative activities. Our journal—which we have needed for so long—will only be as strong as the rate of submissions from our members and readers. Since we need to be in touch with what people are doing in our field, please answer this strong call for articles by sending one for consideration and review. Theatre Topics begins its publishing history with an issue that embraces studies of performance culture, performance space, performance style, performance text, and performance which is non-text based. It collectively presents our interest in the phenomena surrounding the act of performance as well as the textual impulse to perform. Many people, including Marie Hansen, Judith Lerner, and Sandy Fleming at The Johns Hopkins University Press, the ΑΤΉΕ THEatre FORUM and the supportive ATHE Board of Governors, deserve thanks for the journal's development. Specifically, a special thank you goes to Julian Olf, ATHE Vice President for Research and Publications; to James M. Symons, Immediate Past President of ATHE; to Patricia Blom, THEatre FORUM Chair; to the Editorial Review Board; to Ed Szymczak; to Roy Behrens; to Melissa Beall; to Lawrence Broglio, Roberta Sabbath, and Jay Edelnant for their support and diligence; to graduate assistant Mark Giesler; and especially, to Lanette Harmsen. Beverley Byers-Pevitts ...

A connectionist model of visual-word recognition that accounts for interactions between mask size and word length

A connectionist model is described, which accounts for data showing a “mask appropriateness” effect in word and letter recognition. In a backward-masking paradigm, if the letter fragment masks that are used are of a similar size to the word or word fragment they are masking, performance is better than if the masks are longer or discontinuous (Jordan, 1990). The model simulates these effects by adding to the familiar architecture of the interactive activation model “length” units, which are stimulated whenever word units of a particular letter length are active, and “mask” units, which are stimulated by masks of particular sizes and in turn stimulate length units. Detailed predictions of the model are examined for both forward and backward masking, and are found to be in good accord with the data.

The long versus the short letter: A large sample study of a direct-mail campaign

Many authorities on direct marketing strongly advocate longer sales letters over shorter ones. Clearly, letter length can affect response rates, as well as a campaign's production costs. We report results of a successful direct-mail campaign that tested one- and two-page versions of a sales letter. For mailings totaling over 1.15 million pieces, the response rates showed no significant difference between the two letters. But considering production costs, the shorter letter was superior.

Perceptions of the Ideal Cover Letter and Ideal Resume

This study surveyed recruiter, teacher, and student groups to determine the following: attitudes about cover letters and resumes, reasons to reject cover letters and resumes, the contents of the ideal cover letter and where specific information should occur in it, and the importance of various categories of the resume and contents of the ideal resume. The results indicate that 1) limited time is spent in processing cover letters and resumes; 2) the length of a cover letter and resume should be one page; 3) spelling errors, poor grammar, and poor organization are key problems in cover letters and resumes; 4) specific jobs wanted, career goals, and personal information are the most important factors of a cover letter; 5) job objectives/career goals, employment history, and educational history are the most important parts of the resume. Specific differences in attitudes among recruiters, teachers, and students are discussed in this article.

National survey of writers of dean's letters for residency applications.

The purpose of the study reported here was to provide descriptive information about dean's letters, which are comprehensive summary letters sent near the end of students' undergraduate medical training by medical school deans to be part of the students' residency applications. Deans of student affairs at 124 U.S. medical schools were surveyed regarding composition of these letters at their institution. They were asked to describe themselves and the letters they write. Responses were received from 87 percent of these schools and provided data on types of information included in the letters, the decision to edit evaluations, student participation in the letter-writing process, use of final summary statements, cost and length of letters, and attitudes toward the development of national letter-writing guidelines. Major findings of the survey show that 97 percent of the writers allocated more space for clinical evaluations than basic science evaluations. Less than 50 percent of the writers included the student's class rank. Almost all included narrative evaluations of the student's performance during the clinical years. Negative information on students was addressed inconsistently by the writers. Eighty-five percent of the writers categorized their students in final summary statements, but many of these failed to provide descriptions of the categories used or explanatory data. The present authors make recommendations for writing more credible and useful letters.

The development of a standardized, computer-based abbreviation algorithm

Abstract Based upon three simple assumptions about the information-conveying properties of consonants, vowels, syllables and the relative positions of letters and letter groups within parent words, a prototype abbreviation-generating algorithm was constructed. It was reasoned, based on previous studies (Streeter et al. 1980, Reber 1976) and because of the invariant rules which are fundamental to the algorithm, that abbreviations produced by the algorithm should be more readily decoded than naturally produced, popular abbreviations. Experiment I revealed that popular abbreviations were more easily reconstructed than were their rule-based counterparts, although the margin was reliable only for abbreviations of parent words of relatively long letter length. Results of experiment II demonstrated that when feedback was provided to the subject following each reconstruction, accuracy in decoding the algorithm abbreviations improved with practice. No improvement was observed for subjects who were not provided kno...

Lexical knowledge in word recognition: Word length and word frequency in naming and lexical decision tasks

K. I. Forster and S. M. Chambers (1973, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12, 627–635) proposed that making lexical decisions to words and naming words access the same representations of those words in the mental lexicon. It is shown that the correlation between stimuli over tasks is due to word length in letters rather than word frequency. Further experiments with orthographically illegal nonwords and orthographically legal but unwordlike nonwords show that lexical decisions need not be influenced by word length but are influenced by word frequency. This suggests that the letter length effect is due to a postaccess spelling check. Finally, blocked naming, of words only, produces results similar to lexical decision, without length effects but with frequency effects indicative of lexical access. These results suggest two separate and independent routes to word naming, both of which are mediated by lexical knowledge.

POSTWAR GROWTH IN THE LENGTH OF ASTRONOMICAL AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC PAPERS

ABSTRACT Changes in the average length of papers and letters/short contributions in English-language astronomy, mathematics, and physical-science journals since about 1900 are investigated statistically. The results are presented in tables and graphs, and sharp increases are observed for the period 1945-1984, including a 64-percent increase in paper length 1945-1984, a 26-percent increase in letter length 1975-1984, and a 76-percent increase in letter length 1965-1984. Interpretations of these findings by the author and two historians of science, two editors of scientific journals, and one distinguished astronomer are summarized. Factors considered include both social phenomena, such as publishing budgets, manuscript-preparation techniques, language skills, and institutional pressure to publish, and the possibility of a real increase in the amount of scientific information in each paper.

Associative asymmetry, availability, and retrieval.

Associative frequency, the ease with which a word comes to mind in free association, is taken as a measure of general response availability. As expected from this view, in both controlled experiments and in reanalyses of previously published correlational data, high associative frequency words were judged to be more familiar and were easier to recall but harder to recognize than low associative frequency words, even with meaningfulness, imagery, length in letters, and frequency excluded as factors. When used as foils in a recognition experiment, high associative frequency words attracted more responses than low associative frequency words. In addition, associative frequency and meaningfulness correlated only moderately and had different patterns of correlations with other variables, suggesting that the number of associations leading to and from a word differ.

Passive electrical constants in three classes of hippocampal neurons.

Page 815: Thomas H. Brown, Russell A. Fricke, and Donald H. Perkel, “Passive electrical constants in three classes of hippocampal neurons.” The sentence beginning six lines below equation 8 , right-hand column, should read: Although equation 8 was originally derived assuming an infinite electrotonic length, the resultant biases are small when rho is small (11, 32), as described below.

Perceived Approbation in Short, Medium, and Long Letters of Recommendation

Mehrabian (1965) and Wiens, et al. (1969) found that subjects wrote longer letters of recommendation when the letter was for someone they liked rather than disliked. These results led Wiens, et al. to suggest that communication channels may provide a useful nonreactive measure of attitudes and motivations. The present research replicated the above encoding studies with a series of decoding experiments in which subjects rated short, medium-length, and long letters of recommendation written in English, German, or with deleted text. Short letters were evaluated as being least favorable toward the job applicant and long letters were evaluated as being most favorable toward the job applicant. It was concluded that attitudes attributed to length of letter are consistent with attitudes influencing length of letter. Subjects' limited awareness of the influence of length of letter on their evaluations was related to Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) argument about the weakness of introspection. Suggestions were made for future research.

The role of letter recognition in word recognition

In a paradigm that avoids methodological problems of earlier studies, evidence was gathered addressed to the question of whether we read letter by letter. If word recognition involves letter recognition, then the difficulty of recognizing a word should vary with the difficulty of recognizing its letters. This was tested by assessing letter difficulty in two letter discrimination tasks and in a letter naming task, and then comparing 15 adult subjects' visual recognition latency to 72 easy-letter words and to 72 difficult-letter words. Word frequency and word length were also manipulated. Results indicated no effect for letter difficulty, although recognition latency reliably decreased with word frequency and monotonically increased with word length (21 msec/letter), suggesting that we do not read letter by letter, but that whatever plays a role in word recognition is smaller than the word and correlated with word length in letters.

The Relationship between English Word Length and Short-Term Memory

Summary Three experiments examined the relationship between English word length and short-term memory. Two hypotheses were tested: (a) Word length, whether measured by number of letters or number of syllables, will not influence recall; (b) Two-syllable words containing a high-frequency prefix or suffix and one-syllable words of equivalent frequency will be recalled equally well. Seventy-two male and female college students were tested, using the Peterson and Peterson paradigm. The results indicated that (a) When words were equated for frequency, concreteness, and meaningfulness, two-syllable, six-letter, words were recalled more frequently than one-syllable, four-letter words (p < .001), (b) Length in syllables affected recall (p < .025), while length in letters was a factor with borderline significance (p < .10); (c) Two-syllable words with an affix were recalled no better than one-syllable words. It was concluded that the results parallel similar findings in the research on auditory intelligibility.