Abstracts,introductions and discussions: How far do they differ in style?

Two computer-based style programs were used to analyse the Abstracts, Introductions and Discussions of 80 educational psychology journal articles. Measures were made of the overall readability of the texts as well as of sentence lengths, difficult and unique words, articles, prepositions and pronouns. The results showed that the Abstracts scored worst on most of these measures of readability, the Introductions came next, and the Discussions did best of all. However, although the mean scores between the sections differed, the authors wrote in stylistically consistent ways across the sections. Thus readability was variable across the sections but consistent within the authors. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.