LINE LENGTHS "and" STARCH SCORES

A corpus of 153 advertisements collected from the Starch magazines from the years 1980-1985 was analyzed using the "read most" scores provided by the Starch Readership Service as the independent variable to determine the relationship between the length of typeset lines & text readability. The body copy in these advertisements was measured in picas, the average number of characters per line was computed, & these two dependent variables were recorded along with the Starch score. A normal curve with lower scores was hypothesized for the shorter & longer lines, & scores above the mean were predicted for the lines in the middle of the distribution. The study found support for lower scores for short lines & some evidence of two optimum line lengths rather than one. No clear-cut conclusion was reached about the reading ease of longer lines. 5 Tables, 5 References. Z. Dubiel