L.R. LentzUtrecht University | UU · Language, Literature and Communication
L.R. Lentz
Professor Document Design and Communication (emeritus)
About
126
Publications
33,815
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1,153
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 1986 - September 2015
Publications
Publications (126)
While there are EU laws for priority allergenic ingredients information on food product packaging, there is no legislation about Precautionary Allergen Labelling (PAL) for unintended allergen presence (UAP). As a result, PAL is used in different ways by different manufacturers and retailers, which hampers consumers’ interpretation of the informatio...
Background:
Understanding consumers' interpretation of allergy information is crucial for effective food safety policies. We evaluated consumer understanding of allergy information on foods in controlled, experimental studies.
Method:
Using 18 packaged foods, we evaluated consumer understanding of information about allergens in two experiments:...
Background
Allergen information on product labels is crucial in food allergy management. Though, inadequacy in current labelling practices are one of the major causes for accidental reactions upon consuming prepacked food products.
Objective
This study analyses current status of communicating allergen information on food labels and provides practi...
Begrijpelijke taal, wat is het? Is begrijpelijke taal een kwestie van eenvoudige woorden en korte zinnen of is er meer aan de hand? In deze bijdrage laat Leo Lentz zien dat er verschillende opvattingen bestaan over die vraag. Hij pleit voor een benadering waarin het perspectief ligt op de lezer van de tekst en niet op een lijst met kenmerken die je...
This paper used a randomised field experiment to test if tailoring an email invitation induces pension scheme participants to delve into their online personal pension situation. Action perspective and degree of urgency conveyed in the invitation were tailored based on gender and age. Overall, our empirical findings show that such tailoring had no p...
Tailoring in pension communication may help to increase the motivation of pension participants to delve into their pension situation and to improve finding and comprehending pension information. This is a general view in the pension domain, although in daily practice few examples of tailoring pension information can be found. There are some experim...
Improving the court summons. Effects of stylistic and structural revisions on summons comprehensions for readers of different literacy levels
The traditional Dutch court summons does not help readers to understand the information it’s lawfully supposed to communicate. Especially lower literate and lower educated readers cannot deal with this docume...
Based on a corpus of 60 novels, published in three different decades, and 100 newspaper articles, published in two decades, an analysis of stylistic phenomena was conducted, using T-scan, a tool for automatic analysis of Dutch language. The analysis focused on four aspects of complexity: word and sentence complexity, cohesion and personalisation. T...
This study examined the effects of (a) text presentation and (b) prior knowledge and language skill on finding information in financial documents. First, the participants filled out tests that measured their levels of vocabulary, reading skill, domain knowledge, and topic knowledge. Subsequently, they read an on-screen text on pension information i...
Indebted documents: Empirical research on the comprehensibility of the reminder and the court summons in debt collection cases
Every day, thousands of households receive documents concerning debt collection. Unsurprisingly, these documents have a great impact on the lives of many. Do these documents inform readers properly about basics such as the...
Comprehension of pension communication: effects of legal obligations, literacy and revisions
In a project on Financial Communication , research has been done in the domains of pensions, mortgages and debt collection. This paper presents the results of three studies, concentrating on the pension domain. In the first study we reflect upon mandated di...
This chapter presents an experiment with 158 children, aged 10 to 12, in which search performance and attitudes towards an informational Website are investigated. The same Website was designed in 3 different types of interface design varying in playfulness of navigation structure and in playfulness of visual design. The type of interface design did...
The aim of this study is to analyze the process of document design in a multUingual setting. In order to evaluate translation quality, a theoretical perspective is formulated as a basis for criteria for a good translation. In this perspective. the target text is considered an autonomous document. Two sets of criteria are distinguished: correctness...
The structure of patient information leaflets (PILs) supplied with medicines in the European Union is largely determined by a regulatory template, requiring a fixed sequence of pre-formulated headings and sub-headings. The template has been criticized on various occasions, but it has never been tested with users. This paper proposes an alternative...
This paper analyzes the role of helpdesk calls in the client communication package of pension funds. Our audio-corpus of 77 helpdesk calls contained 104 client questions. These show that clients seem to call the helpdesk in order to repair a comprehension problem, to find specific information they missed, to repair incorrect information or an admin...
Patient information leaflets are a heavily regulated text genre. In Europe, Australia, and the United States,
authorities have issued mandated templates with instructions for these leaflets. Ideally, templates optimize
the findability of medicine information. In previous research, we have encountered several findability
problems. In subsequent stud...
Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by
consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational ar...
Purpose: This paper introduces the Knowledge Base Comprehensible Text, a digital resource containing 702 studies on comprehension and usability of text and discourse, published between 1980 and 2010. The paper explains which publications were included in the knowledge base, how they were collected, how they were annotated and what the interface of...
Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by
consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational ar...
This chapter presents an experiment with 158 children, aged 10 to 12, in which search performance and attitudes towards an informational Website are investigated. The same Website was designed in 3 different types of interface design varying in playfulness of navigation structure and in playfulness of visual design. The type of interface design did...
Websites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of specific pages by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. The authors investigate users' (N=153) abilities to provide such feedback and the kind of feedback that is the result. They compare the results of these so called user page review methods with...
Purpose: Research on Web design conventions has an almost exclusive focus on Web design for adults. There is far less knowledge about Web design for children. For the first time, an overview is presented of the current design conventions for children's informational Web sites.Method: In this study a large corpus of 100 children's international, inf...
The quality of governmental websites is often measured with questionnaires that ask users for their opinions on various aspects of the website. This article presents the Website Evaluation Questionnaire (WEQ), which was specifically designed for the evaluation of governmental websites. The multidimensional structure of the WEQ was tested in a contr...
Web sites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of the content by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. Little is known about users’ abilities to provide such feedback. To guide the development of evaluation tools, this study examines to what extent users with various background characteristics are...
Vaak moeten adviezen voor begrijpelijke taal het stellen zonder empirische ondersteuning. Dit artikel doet verslag van de ontwikkeling van de Kennisbank Begrijpelijke Taal, een database met 469 artikelen over empirisch begrijpelijkheidsonderzoek die zowel in het Nederlands als in het Engels beschikbaar is. De gebruiker kan deze artikelen bijvoorbee...
Tientallen jaren van leesbaarheidsonderzoek hebben laten zien dat het ontwikkelen van een betrouwbaar apparaat voor het meten van leesbaarheid van teksten geen eenvoudige zaak is. Ondersteund door nieuwe taaltechnologie lijkt het leesbaarheidsonderzoek voor het Engels de afgelopen jaren
begonnen te zijn aan een tweede leven. Op de markt voor het Ne...
The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has suggested including a'headline section' in patient information leaflets, which gives an overview of the key information related to the safe and effective use of the medicine. What is the value of such a headline section on the perception and effectiveness of the leaflet? A user t...
Purpose: This paper assesses the text structure imposed on patient information leaflets in the European Union (EU). It proposes an alternative structure based on reader-oriented research.Method: Two card-sorting studies were used to identify reader expectations. In a closed card-sorting study, participants were provided with scenario questions on m...
The retrospective think-aloud method, in which participants work in silence and verbalize their thoughts afterwards while watching a recording of their performance, is often used for the evaluation of websites. However, participants may not always be able to recall what they thought, when they only see few visual cues that help them remembering the...
Burgers moeten de bijsluiter bij hun medicijnen, de offerte voor een hypotheek en het overzicht van hun pensioen kunnen begrijpen. Daarom is in de wet vastgelegd dat die teksten begrijpelijk moeten zijn. Maar zowel de omschrijving in de wet als het toezicht op de uitvoering schiet tekort. Dat concludeert prof. dr. Leo Lentz, hoogleraar Tekstontwerp...
Many government organizations use web heuristics for the quality assurance of their websites. Heuristics may be used by web designers to guide the decisions about a website in development, or by web evaluators to optimize or assess the quality of an existing website. Despite their popularity, very little is known about the usefulness of heuristics...
De medische bijsluiter is een veel bekritiseerd genre. Toch is op Europees niveau vastgelegd dat bijsluiters leesbaar moeten zijn. Bijsluiters voor nieuwe geneesmiddelen moeten zelfs getest worden voordat het middel op de markt mag worden toegelaten. Er is een norm gesteld dat 80% van
alle vragen goed beantwoord moet zijn. In dit artikel wordt een...
Children frequently make use of the Internet to search for information. However, research shows that children experience many problems with searching and browsing the web. The last decade numerous search environments have been developed, especially for children. Do these search interfaces support children in effective information-seeking? And do th...
This study assesses the usability of three patient information leaflets and attempts to improve them while complying with the current EU regulations.
Three original leaflets were tested among 154 potential users. Every participant answered 15 scenario questions for one of the leaflets. The leaflets were subsequently redesigned based on the test res...
Discusses the cognitive shortcuts that may hinder technical communicators in empathizing with readers
Explores the issue of judging the severity of problems detected in a document evaluation
Demonstrates how cognitive shortcuts may affect technical communicators' capability to assess the likelihood and impact of reader problems
Several studies showed how coherence markers, like connectives and lexical cue phrases, influence the processing and representation of informative text. Although discourse analysts have repeatedly argued that coherence markers influence the processing of persuasive text as well, there is hardly any empirical evidence for this idea. This article rep...
Summary Questions the contribution of heuristics to problem detectionShows that heuristics provide more focus to expert evaluation
Questions the contribution of heuristics to problem detection Shows that heuristics provide more focus to expert evaluation
Coherence plays a central role when readers construct meaning from a text. Previous research has shown how coherence marking affects text processing and representation. However, this effect seems to depend on reader's prior knowledge of the text content: Low knowledge readers benefit from coherence marking, whereas high knowledge readers benefit fr...
An important objective of research in information design is the validation of methods that are available for the evaluation of public information. In this article three evaluation methods using verbal self-reports are compared: think aloud reader protocols, the plus-minus method and Focus (a software tool designed to collect reader responses on doc...
Research has shown that professional writers cannot accurately predict the problems readers will experience when using functional documents. In this paper, we give an overview of reasons why it can be so hard for writers to anticipate reader problems. We elaborate on the concept of empathy, and discuss a broad range of research offering explanation...
Online questionnaires are frequently used to monitor the quality of municipal and other governmental websites. In the present
situation, many government organizations seem to reinvent the wheel and develop their own questionnaire. This leads to the
undesirable situation that website quality is often assessed with instruments that are not comparable...
Municipal Web sites are a prominent product of e-government initiatives worldwide. The Internet is becoming increasingly important in the communication between local governments and citizens, which makes the usability of municipal Web sites a critical factor in government–citizen communication. A current approach to ensure the quality of municipal...
Municipal websites are highly visible manifestations of e-government developments. Though the content and functionality of
these websites are rapidly expanding, the usability of municipal websites is as yet underexposed. This paper reports on the
results of a scenario-based evaluation of 15 Dutch municipal websites. Despite the often positive score...
Why is it so hard, even for professional writers, to prevent reader problems from occurring in documents? In this paper, we focus on one crucial aspect of the anticipation process: the assessment of problem detections. We report on an exploratory study in which experts had to judge and motivate the likelihood and severity of a set of reader problem...
The first part of this article distinguishes between individual cognitive and behavioral effects, and organizational results. It also shows how a main document purpose may be decomposed into a hierarchical network containing sub-goals. But a functional analysis needs to do more than describe single purposes. Single communicative purposes are an imp...
The author of an instruction sometimes experiences the problem of how to present two simultaneous acts, because they can not be read in one and the same moment. In Dutch cooking recipes we often find two kinds of constructions, like in (1) and (2), that might solve this problem. (1) Add the cream while stirring the soup (2) Add the cream under cont...
Reader feedback is generally considered to be valuable input for writers who want to optimize their documents, but a reader-focused evaluation is often time-consuming. For this reason, we have developed Focus, a software tool for collecting reader comments more efficiently. The design and rationale of the software are described in this article. In...
The aim of the study is to analyze the process of document design
in a multilingual setting. In order to evaluate translation quality, a
theoretical perspective is formulated as a basis for criteria for a good
translation. In this perspective, the target text is considered an
autonomous document. Two sets of criteria are distinguished: correctness...
The authors compare a reader-focused text evaluation with an
expert-focused evaluation by technical writers and subject/audience
experts. The experts were asked to predict the problems readers had
signaled in a government brochure about alcohol. On average, they
predicted less than 15% of the reader problems and produced a lot of new
problem detect...
Are technical writers able to predict the results of a reader-focused text evaluation? In this article we report a study with fifteen technical writers, who were asked to point out the reader problems in a public information brochure. The brochure was also evaluated with thirty readers from the target audience (using a combination of the plus-minus...
How have Dutch instructive texts changed in the course of the last century? This question is the topic of a research project presented in this article. First, we give some insight into the kind of documents we have collected in our corpus. The oldest instructive texts date from the beginning of the nineteenth century. But for most technical devices...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This article explores the problems faced by professional writers in attempting to anticipate the needs of their readers. On the basis of two studies (a study of the literature on expert/novice communication and an exploratory study requiring experts to assess and explain the likelihood and severity of various problems for readers), the authors dist...
In diverse methoden voor tekstevaluatie leggen we aan proefpersonen categorieën voor van lezersproblemen, zoals stijl, structuur en begrip. Soms in de vorm van schaaltjes waarop zij een score moeten aangeven of in open vragen zoals:“Wat vindt u van de stijl van deze tekst?” Soms ook in de vorm van aandachtspunten waarop lezers hun commentaar moeten...
Projects
Projects (3)
When seeking to understand complex financial products such as pensions and mortgages, consumers need to find their way in a varied landscape of documents and internet tools on the one hand and telephone and face-to-face consultations on the other hand. This project investigates how the design of this Multimodal Information Environment (MIE) and of its components affects consumers' product understanding.
The project consists of two parallel PhD projects, one on pensions and one on mortgages. In both projects, we focus on clients' decision making processes on long term financial arrangements. The research proceeds in three stages: exploring the current design of the MIE and its components; diagnosing potential communication problems in the use of these components; and implementing and testing interventions. These interventions will apply both to individual MIE component (improved documents and tools; advice to counselors doing consultations) and to enhancing the mutual relations between these modes. The interventions will be designed and tested in close collaboration with three major parties in the financial market: ABN AMRO, Zwitserleven and Achmea.
Theoretically, this project is innovative for two reasons. First, it combines two rarely combined traditions in discourse research: discourse processing and applied conversation analysis. Secondly, it will contribute to a theory of multimodality by analyzing the sequential interplay of different communicative modalities in a longer decision making process.