A simple entry form such as a credit card sales receipt usually has fewer than ten labels (date, description, amount, GST, total, customers’s signature, etc,) and usually no more than a dozen specific pieces of information on the completed form (merchant number, date, credit card number, one or two purchase amounts, one total, etc.) Such a simple document cannot support questions and directives at a very high level of difficulty–there is not much opportunity to locate information, or a lot of information to locate; the specifics are concrete; there are few plausible distractors for the information given or requested.

Information about document complexity is captured using the PMOSE/IKIRSCH Document Readability Formula on page 41. The composition of documents and the number of category labels and specific items they comprise are to a great degree reflected in the complexity of matching information and in the presence of plausible distracting information. However, when the document being analyzed is judged to be ‘complex’ or ‘highly complex’ all tasks using that document can be rated as more complex. (See the Rating Guide starting on page 31.)

Whenever you are considering the complexity of a document or a prose passage, remember that it is not the document that determines the task complexity, but rather the task. We can carry out both simple and difficult tasks with complex documents–a newspaper can be used to find a job; or you can wrap fish and chips in it!