Giving readers what they want: what the research tells us about readable documents

It is pointed out that reading is a strategic process guided by readers´ expectations and goals. The readability of a document is largely determined by the ease with which the reader can understand the text. In order to gain comprehension, readers strategically use the graphic, the syntactic, and the semantic cues they find in the text. The graphic cues provide the reader access to the information, and they point out important information. Syntactic cues define how the information in the text is related, and how it gives the text coherence. The semantic cues in the text involve readers in the action of the text and they suggest to readers how to build mental models of the meaning of the text. It is concluded that, by incorporating these cues, the technical writer can design documents that serve both the reader´s needs and the purpose of the text