文档介绍：Alan G. Sawyer, Juliano Laran, & Jun Xu
The Readability of Marketing
Journals: Are Award-Winning
Articles Better Written?
This is a study of the readability of articles in four marketing journals: Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing
Research, Journal of International Marketing, and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. For each journal, the
pare articles that have won an award with articles that have not. The authors find that award-winning
articles are more readable, as measured by indexes focusing on sentence and word length, than nonwinning
articles. The authors also identify and analyze other characteristics of more readable journal articles and discuss
the importance of good writing.
Keywords: readability, award-winning articles, marketing journals, path analysis
he October 2005 Journal of Marketing (JM) includes ing to a paper’s ultimate disposition. Reviewers are justifi-
11 essays about challenges to marketing and the con- ably impatient with manuscripts in which the contribution is
Ttent and impact of published research in marketing not clear, there are many typos (even in this era of spelling
journals. The essay “Readability and the Impact of Market- checkers), and so on. Do not believe that these kinds of
ing”(Bauerly, Johnson, and Singh 2005) documents a steep problems will be eliminated through revisions; if the writ-
decline of readability in JM articles in the early 1970s, ing is sufficiently unclear, the author might not get that
when marketing academics became more scientific and spe- opportunity.” Finally, in his outgoing Journal of Consumer
cialized. Since then, readability has remained low. This arti- Research editorial, Lutz (1990, p. 244) states, “Frankly, it is
cle offers an expanded empirical investigation of the read- appalling to see how badly so many of us write.” In addition
ability of marketing journal articles. to bad writing, virtually all editors focus on the excessive
The current manuscript evaluatio