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How much opinion do you need in order to decide how "readable" something is?

If one person, even if experienced, says "this is not very well readable", then I think it not enough to conclude it's not very well readable. Reason:

  • It's just one person

  • It's based on what that one person sees as readable, even if he/she would have experience (which may be based on reading only texts he/she finds "readable")

So how many people does one need to sample in order to have a well-informed view on "readability"?

OTOH:

  • If this one person is an accomplished reader (reads a lot), then is his/her opinion more informed?
  • If the sample for "judges" here would include also people who read very little, then would these be "uninformed" reviewers, since they have read only a small sample?
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  • What type of writing? I doubt the answer will be the same between a novel and an academic publication.
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 15:22
  • @Laurel You sure? Shouldn't both ultimately require more than a small board to conclusively infer readability? After all I think there are academic publications that are readable by some council, but not necessarily so much in broader population. Why? Because the council is biased, since it's a small sample.
    – mavavilj
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 15:26
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    Assume they weren't lying for nefarious reasons. Were they maybe expecting an edited, polished work and you gave them an in-progress draft…? You can get 2nd and 3rd opinions sure, but at some point you might want to hear what your 'experienced' reader is telling you since that's the point of getting their opinion... If this is fiction, you can consult a 'story doctor' who will break down what is and isn't working. If the problem is grammar or language, bring in a proof-reader to help make sentences clearer. You could easily replace 1 honest reader with several who say what you want to hear.
    – wetcircuit
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 15:38
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    No sorry. Experience absolutely says their opinion is more valid, in EVERY skill that can be learned. The fallacy is that you are trying to discredit the source in a very "anyone might be wrong" kind of way, rather than addressing their criticism directly. We're not emotionally invested, and you've already shown yourself to be bad at taking advice, so I'm not going to argue with you. Simple counter to your argument: HOW MANY READERS TOLD YOU IT WAS PERFECT? Directly contradicting the 'experienced' person?
    – wetcircuit
    Commented Nov 13, 2021 at 15:48
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    There might be valid reasons to sacrifice (some) readability. For example if you have a story in which some characters speak in a hard-to-read accent. Or perhaps for certain stylistic reasons. It depends on your audience. If you are your own audience, feel free to ignore what anyone else says, and otherwise find the balance between what satisfies you and what satisfies the audience. If you're writing the proof to a mathematical problem that has been open for centuries, you have a lot of leeway to be unreadable. If you're writing a story, you're dime a dozen, they'll read someone else.
    – user54131
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 7:04

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I think that if one person says "this is not very well readable", then you probably have a problem.

Provided that the person actually represents your audience in any way (or has expert knowledge about your audience), it means that part of your audience will have an issue with your work's readability. Getting more opinions will help to gauge how big of a problem it is, but the problem is likely real.

It's then up to you to decide how much of your readership you're willing to alienate/dismiss.

I think it's also important to note that an issue like readability isn't really symmetrical. If one person says that the readability is fine, it's much less informative than when they say it's bad.

It's a bit like someone spotting a typo that others have overlooked. You can have had a hundred proofreaders go over your manuscript and think you found and fixed every typo. But if the hundredth-and-first proofreader spots a new typo, then it's a typo.

Yes, readability is much less objective than whether something is a typo or not. But to an extent it is just a matter of detecting problems. And finding something is a stronger signal than not finding something.

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It depends on their expertise. It can be just one person.

If I am writing fiction, and one of my friends that I know reads a lot of fiction, and recommends good fiction, then reads my fiction and says it needs work -- That's all I need. That girl knows fiction.

The same with a professional reader; an agent or publisher. If they just turn me down, that is not saying I wrote bad fiction, just that they don't have time, room or money for my fiction. I don't take that personally or as a critique.

But if they say something specific about my fiction, like it is "unreadable", I'm going to give that one opinion a fair amount of weight.

Kind of like putting a lot more weight on a real medical doctor's opinion on health issues, and a lot less weight on some Amazon warehouse worker's opinion on health issues.

I suppose I might be surprised, but my bet is on the professionals and those with relevant experience.

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...or the unbiased approach rooted in probability theory.

I am proposing this answer for the following reasons:

  1. the OP seems to have some reserves in considering experience as a valuable weighting function.
  2. I want to address the case in which most of the target readers are of the uninformed / unexperienced type

Let's consider readability to be a quantity r, such that given a population of individual readers we can define: i) the average readability R and ii) its standard deviation S.

You can now ask a certain number n of random people, selected without bias from the population of interest, to read your text and give their estimate of readability.

The central limit theorem says that the average of these estimates converges to the mean readability for the population as n increases.

It also says that the convergence rate is 1/\sqrt(n). That is, if asking one person only yields a standard deviation (think of as variability in the response) of S, asking n people and averaging their response yields a much lower standard deviation S/\sqrt(n).

Best results if you ask people to rate your readability with a number on a fixed scale, e.g. from 0 to 10.

In just a few reads you could get a decently accurate estimate of what the larger population of readers would say about the readability of your text. And you could ask just anyone.

For instance, asking 4 people, the average estimate has only half the standard deviation compared to asking just one person. If you can ask 8 people, you have reduced the error in the estimated readability to about 30% of asking just one person.

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  • You could even just use a random excerpt to get your readability evaluated. Shorter texts can be assessed quicker, and you can ask more people, including random readers on the internet. The caveat is that there is a tradeoff between the length of the text and the error, which could cancel out the benefits of the increased sample size in the readers' pool.
    – NofP
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 13:29
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    In the context of this answer, you can consider "experts" as people that can estimate "average readability" with a much smaller deviation than normal readers. Though I'd be hard-pressed to put an actual number on it.
    – user54131
    Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 18:20
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Zero readers is the absolute minimum number needed.

There are automated tests of readability in tools like www.prowritingaid.com which, when given a sample of your writing, will give you a numeric measure of its readability. Simultaneously, it checks your spelling, grammar, word-choice and a ton of other metrics of questionable value.

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To be truthfull, I consider myself someone with not exactly the best taste in the world. I go for entertaining. If it has quality, then so much the better. I wouldn't mind reading something considered bad if it appeals to the things I like or is simply entertaining.

I would really pay no mind to people's opinions. Mostly, I just pay attention the following:

  • Is the story well written or at least decently done? While I'm not expecting a masterpiece, at I'm hoping for at least something readable.
  • I pay a lot of attention to those elements I simply detest (trigger warnings or simply bad tropes.) If someone's opinion reveals the story has some of them, I would be wary of reading it.
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