A study of the style difficulties of three United States newspapers from 1955 to 1995

The term style difficulty refers specifically to analyses by the Reading Ease formula by Flesch (1951) and by similar methods that measure readability. This thesis is an application of the Reading Ease formula on the texts of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Jose Mercury News for 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1995. Related to the studies by Stevenson (1964) and Fusaro and Conover (1990), this thesis is an attempt to determine if style difficulties are higher for quality newspapers than for sensationalistic newspapers.;Comparisons for individual newspapers over years and for individual years among newspapers yield only partial confirmations of the correlation between style difficulty and newspaper quality. Results also indicate, however, that newspapers producing quality journalism for the most number of years exhibit the highest overall levels of style difficulty.