Bonnie Meyer and organization Bonnie Meyer and others worked on using the organization of larger units of texts as a possible measurement of readability. She claimed that a text that follows a topical plan is more efficient (saves effort) and more effective (gets more results). She wrote:

That is, people remember more and read faster information which is logically organized with a topical plan than they do when the same information is presented in a disorganized, random fashion.... Thus the plan of discourse can be considered apart from content, and deserves separate consideration from researchers, as from those who are planning a composition (Meyer 1982, p. 38).

Among Meyer's observations are the following:

• A visible plan for presenting content plays a key role in assessing the difficulty of a text.
• A plan incorporates a hierarchy showing the dependencies of the facts to one another:
• The antecedent/consequent plan shows causal relationships in "if/then" logic.
• The comparison plan presents two opposing views that give weight to both sides.
• The adversative plan clearly favors one side over the other (political speeches).
• The description plan describes the component parts of an item (newspaper articles). This plan is the least effective for remembering and recall.
• The response plan gives answers to remarks, questions, and problems (science articles).
• The time-order plan relates events chronologically (history texts).

Better readers tend to share the same plan as authors of the material they are reading. Readers who use a different plan other than the authors may be at a disadvantage.

There are two types of highlighting for showing the relationships between items:

• Subordination, used to connect the main idea with supporting text as in a hierarchical structure.
• Signaling, explicit markers to clarify relationships such as: "On the one hand...On the other hand..." "Three things have to be stressed here." "Thus," "consequently," and "therefore" "Nevertheless," "all the same," "although," "but," and "however"

Signaling can also clarify how larger blocks of content are related, for example: "For example," "For further details," "summary," "abstract," "conclusion," and "preview." For more on signaling, see the studies by Jan Spyridakis (1989, 1989a).

Besides reducing the difficulty of the text, Meyer wrote that strategy training can also help older adults deal with the difficulties they encounter in reading.

Bonnie Armbruster and textual coherence Also concerned with larger units of text, Bonnie Armbruster (1984) found that the most important feature for learning and comprehension is textual coherence, which comes in two types:

• Global coherence, which integrates high-level ideas across an entire section, chapter, or book.
• Local coherence, which uses connectives to link ideas within and between sentences.