Händel, D., Fluck, H. R., Förster, M., & Blaha, M. (2001). Bürgernahe Verwaltungstexte: ein Kooperationsprojekt der Stadt Bochum und der Ruhr-Universität zur Textoptimierung. [Reader-friendly administrative-legal texts: A collaboration project between the city of Bochum and Ruhr University on text improvement.] Fachsprache, 23(3-4), 139-152.
Handel, D.; Fluck, H.; Forster, M.; Blaha, M.
2001
Händel, D., Fluck, H. R., Förster, M., & Blaha, M. (2001). Bürgernahe Verwaltungstexte: ein Kooperationsprojekt der Stadt Bochum und der Ruhr-Universität zur Textoptimierung. [Reader-friendly administrative-legal texts: A collaboration project between the city of Bochum and Ruhr University on text improvement.] Fachsprache, 23(3-4), 139-152.
geen
Related is a project in which the city of Bochum & the Ruhr U of Bochum collaborated with the objective of making the texts produced by the various departments of the municipal administration more intelligible to citizens. The project consisted of three parts: (1) identification of domains in which written communication between the municipal government & citizens is most negatively affected by the language, jargon, & style of texts produced by the former, (2) a joint development of solutions leading to the creation of texts which are more readable & comprehensible for an average citizen, & (3) an implementation of these solutions in practice. A corpus of 74 texts was subjected to a computer-assisted analysis which identified lexical, syntactic, & stylistic elements which obstructed or completely prevented easy & correct understanding of their content by lay readers unversed in technical terminology, jargon, & sentence structure. Training sessions were held with city employees, authors of these text in day-to-day discharge of duties, to improve the syntax, lexicon, & style of their productions. A survey of Bochum residents (N = 38) who read both original & improved versions of the texts showed a significant increase in the comprehension of the latter.
A survey of Bochum residents (N = 38) who read both original & improved versions of the texts showed a significant increase in the comprehension of the latter. The optimized version was also chosen as the best text by the residents.
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