7Brevity Versus Clarity: The Comprehensibility of Nominal Compounds in Business and Technical Prose

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. The purpose of this study is to determine whether nominal compoundsretain sufficient syntactic and semantic information for easy under-standing by the reader to justify their frequent use, in the name of brevity, in business and technical writing. This study seeks to discover (a) whether nominal compounds in business and technical prose are understood by our subjects as semantically equivalent to the syntacti-cally more elaborated forms, and (b) whether comprehension problems are exclusively semantic or whether they involve syntactics as well