Cloze procedure: A new tool for measuring readability

Cloze procedure: A new tool for measuring readability is a 1953 paper by Wilson L. Taylor, published in Journalism Quarterly, that introduced the cloze procedure.

The idea is to delete words from a passage (for example, every fifth word) and ask readers to fill in the blanks. The proportion of blanks filled in correctly measures how readable the text is for those readers. The name comes from "closure", the Gestalt idea that people tend to complete an incomplete pattern.

Unlike formulas such as Flesch Reading Ease, which only count things like sentence and word length, a cloze test measures how well real readers understand the text. The same fill-in-the-blank idea shows up in cloze deletion flashcards and in Masked Language Modelling.