Intrinsic viscosity and light scattering measurements have been made on dilute solutions of partially aromatized precursor polymers of poly(p-phenylene) in N-methylpyrrolidinone. These data have been used to provide values of the persistence length and shift factor in the worm-like-chain model of semiflexible molecules. Because of aggregation effects, interpretation of the data has been restricted to a maximum of 20% aromatization. Viscosity data indicate that persistence lengths increase from ca. 12 to 130 Angstrom as the percentage aromatization increases from 0 to 20%. The shift factor also increases over this range. Light scattering values for the radius of gyration also produce persistence length values which increase with percentage aromatization but the values are larger than the viscometric values. Light scattering data are more scattered than viscosity data and possible sources for this disparity are discussed.