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Brevity Versus Clarity: The Comprehensibility of Nominal Compounds in Business and Technical Prose

Colorado State University

Richard Pompian

The University of Texas at Austin

This study empirically tested the assumption that nominal compounds, the juxtaposi tion of three or more nouns, retain sufficient semantic information to justify their use for brevity. The most important finding was that over one-third of the respondents misidentified (out of five compounds given them) at least one headword—syntactically, the last noun in the compound. We therefore recommend: (1) Students, as readers, be reminded of the headword's importance and (2) nominal compounds be employed for clearer understanding only following their syntactically fuller forms (including prepositions, verbals, etc.) in a manner similar to that employed for acronyms.

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