Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The virtues of opaque prose: How lay beliefs about fluency influence perceptions of quality

2010; Elsevier BV; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jesp.2010.08.002

1096-0465

Jeff Galak, Leif D. Nelson,

Advanced Text Analysis Techniques

Instructors tell their students to write clearly. This prescription meshes with our intuition, wins confirmation in scores of books on writing, and finds empirical confirmation in research on perceptual fluency: People like content that is easy to process. Nevertheless, in some circumstances people expect content to be difficult, and ease might be interpreted as a lack of quality. We investigate this possibility by asking people to judge the quality of written text which varies in fluency (through the manipulation of font and facial feedback). Across three studies, disfluent content was judged to be of higher quality when it was thought to come from a source focused on conveying information than one designed to maximize enjoyment.