Structure, Sign, and Play by Alan Bass
Published 1972
How hard is Structure, Sign, and Play to read?
Structure, Sign, and Play scores 87 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 88 out of 100
- Highly technical vocabulary, much of it coined for the occasion.
- Sentence structure: 88 out of 100
- Extremely long, self-qualifying sentences.
- Abstraction: 95 out of 100
- An argument about the conditions of structure itself.
- Information density: 88 out of 100
- Every sentence advances and complicates at once.
How Structure, Sign, and Play is regarded
Structure, Sign, and Play holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.