Assessing the Readability of Policy Documents on the Digital Single Market of the European Union

TL;DR

This study evaluates the readability of EU policy documents related to the Digital Single Market, revealing that most require advanced education to understand, with slight improvements over time, using five classical readability indices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the readability of EU legislative and policy texts concerning the Digital Single Market.

Findings

Most documents require Ph.D. level education to understand

Readability has slightly improved over time

Results vary across different readability indices

Abstract

Today, literature skills are necessary. Engineering and other technical professions are not an exception from this requirement. Traditionally, technical reading and writing have been framed with a limited scope, containing documentation, specifications, standards, and related text types. Nowadays, however, the scope covers also other text types, including legal, policy, and related documents. Given this motivation, this paper evaluates the readability of 201 legislations and related policy documents in the European Union (EU). The digital single market (DSM) provides the context. Five classical readability indices provide the methods; these are quantitative measures of a text's readability. The empirical results indicate that (i) generally a Ph.D. level education is required to comprehend the DSM laws and policy documents. Although (ii) the results vary across the five indices used, (iii) readability has slightly improved over time.