Websites, presentations, proposals, brochures – content is everywhere. There are countless guides to writing persuasive copy, and they all agree that one of the key qualities of good writing is simplicity, or ‘readability’. Yet companies often make the error of using ‘corporate speak’ or grandiose, complex jargon that is difficult to read, understand and digest, giving their content a low readability score.
Related: 5 Secrets of Successful Opening Scripts
To test the readability of your content, try one of the oldest and most accurate readability formulas, the Flesch Reading Ease Formula. It’s a simple and accurate measure that is used to assess the difficulty of reading passages written in English.
The formula
The formula for the Flesch reading-ease score is:
RE = 206,835 – (1,015 x ASL) – (84,6 x ASW)
RE = Readability Ease
ASL =
Average Sentence Length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences)
ASW =
Average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words)
The RE is a number ranging from 0 to 100. A higher score indicates easier readability:
Scores between 90 and 100 are considered easily understandable by an average 11-year-old learner.
Scores between 60 and 70 are considered easily understood by 13 to 15-year-olds.
Scores between 0 and 30 are considered easily understood by university graduates.
Another way to interpret the results is
as follows:
- 90-100: Very Easy
- 80-89: Easy
- 70-79: Fairly Easy
- 60-69: Standard
- 50-59: Fairly Difficult
- 30-49: Difficult
- 0-29: Very Confusing
Less is more
The figures indicate that you can make your content easier to read by constructing shorter sentences with fewer words, and words with fewer syllables: ‘buy’ rather than ‘purchase’, ‘use’, not ‘utilise’, ‘help’ not ‘facilitate’, ‘send’, not ‘disseminate’.
To give you an idea of the readability of popular texts, Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65. Time magazine scores about 52. The Harvard Law Review, however, has a readability score in the low 30s.
