In this study of expert use of anaphoric “this,” six history textbook passages written by composition instructors, text linguists, and professional editors are submitted to cloze procedure for comprehensive analysis. Discrepancies in the predictability of content and function words pinpoint examples of ineffective anaphoric expressions using “this” as a demonstrative pronoun (“unattended this”) or “this” as a demonstrative adjective introducing a noun phrase (“attended this”). The analysis indicates that (a) current stylistic guidelines proscribing unattended “this” are overstated and (b) attended “this” is best employed when synonyms for the antecedent and descriptive adjectives are used to provide the reader new information about the referent. The study's information theory perspective leads to the further generalization that effective written communication is often syntactically predictable and semantically not.

Two studies based on an information theory model of reader enjoyment investigated the role of syntactic and semantic unpredictability in determining readers' evaluations of journalistic prose. In each study, reader enjoyment ratings for a set of articles reporting a single news event were compared with cloze procedure results in which function-word and content-word responses were analyzed separately using entropy and cloze scoring techniques. Both studies revealed a statistically significant correlation between function-word predictability and reader enjoyment. In addition, a strong correlation between content-word unpredictability and reader enjoyment in one study supported the notion that readers prefer texts that are characterized by a high degree of semantic unpredictability.