Cloze Procedure

The term cloze procedure is most commonly used by communication specialists to describe a fill-in-the-blank sentence-completion technique provided to elicit target vocabulary words, linguistic structures (e.g., adjective, noun phrase, and verb phrase), or message content. For the lay public, childhood experiences completing a game of “Mad Libs” with family or friends may have been a memorable, early exposure to a cloze procedure format. If unfamiliar, Mad Libs is a game in which key content words are deleted from a passage and individuals fill in a message or linguistic structure based on categorically based cues to complete the passage in humorous and often nonsensical ways (e.g., “__[exclamation]__! __[proper noun]__ said as she __[adverb]__ jumped onto the boat and sped off with her __[adjective]__ prize.”). However, within ...