Readability refers to the ease with which people can grasp what you are saying. Ensuring good readability is among your most important tasks as a writer or editor. Hard-to-read text and hard-to-understand content is content people won’t bother reading.
Measuring readability
There are at least a half-dozen formulas you can use to measure readability. By far the most popular is the Flesch-Kincaid index. This is the one Microsoft Word’s built-in Spelling and Grammar function uses.
Most formulas score readability by grade level. The average USA adult reads at an eighth-grade level. This equates to 12 to 14 years old.
So why does it matter?
It’s possible the content you write or edit is something people must read, whether for work or school. It’s more likely, however, that people read your content only if they choose to do so.
Many businesses measure the success of their content marketing program solely on the number of people who click on a link that takes them to a page or blog post on the company website. All this establishes, however, is that the apparent subject was sufficiently compelling to get people to click a hyperlink.
The metric marketers should actually pay attention to is how long visitors remain on the site once they arrive. Often, it’s just a matter of seconds. Why is this?
- Sometimes, it’s because the actual content of the page or blog post isn’t what visitors thought it would be.
- More often than not, however, it’s because the content of the post or page was too difficult to read or too hard to understand.
Again, no one is sticking a gun to people’s heads and forcing them to read.
If you succeed in getting people to come to your website, you want them to stay for more than a few seconds. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to visit other pages and, ultimately, make a buying decision.
If it is a blog post that brought them to your site, you want people to read it all the way through. This is why readability is important.
The importance of readability extends to all forms of written content. This includes everything from owner’s manuals to textbooks and emails. In short, it matters.
“But my audience is different…”
You may be thinking, “My audience is different. They are primarily college-educated. They can read at a twelfth-grade level and above.” Wrong.
Just because people are capable of reading at a higher grade level doesn’t mean they want to. Doing so may be just too much work.
Given a choice between harder and easier tasks, people will invariably choose the easier one. This is especially true if the perceived reward is the same.
Because easier to read often translates into easier to comprehend, it’s likely easy-to-read text offers an even greater reward than hard-to-read content.
Trust us, easy-to-read content won’t insult your readers’ intelligence. It will, however, help ensure more of your content is seen and read.
Ensuring good readability
Improving readability isn’t hard. It chiefly involves using shorter words, sentences and paragraphs. Throughout this site, you’ll find several articles devoted to improving readability. These include:
- Readability is more than spelling and grammar
- Software for writers and editors
- Involve your readers for greater impact
Take the time to learn more. It will be worth it.