Why readability matters to all of us
Remember to keep it simple, stunner.
What is readability and why does it matter?
Readability determines how easy it is to read a text. It’s something you can turn up or down, depending on some elements in your writing.
Why do I always mention it when I’m asked to edit or write something? Because it matters to everyone, regardless of your subject or audience. But it especially matters to people who are marginalised, excluded and traditionally have had trouble accessing information.
When we write long sentences, big words and complicated sentence structures, our meaning gets lost. It becomes buried—or even worse, skewed—as the reader needs to put effort into putting it together.
If you want your reader to absorb your information correctly and quickly, readability is important.
What’s a readability score?
We can measure readability using a number of tools (my faves are the Hemingway app and Visible Thread). The tools assess your writing according to a bunch of elements that make text more complicated or harder to read. They then give you a grade.
The grade is an indication of the level of education needed to comprehend the text. It doesn’t mean you’re writing for someone in that year at school. For example, this blog post is at a grade 5. My audience are not 10-year olds. But the content is easy enough to follow for an adult who achieved a year 5 education.
Government departments increasingly need to meet readability scores for their online content. It makes content more accessible to a wider audience. But it’s also important for a highly intelligent audience, who have a lot to read and are time poor.
This article tells you what readability is and why it’s important. You can also read my article with tips on how to improve readability in your writing.
Improving readability is not ‘dumbing down’
Some people believe writing in a less readable way will make them look smarter. Or that if their audience are smart people, they would prefer to read more formal and complicated writing.
These people probably say turning something into plain English is ‘dumbing down’ the text. But there’s a difference between dumbing something down and making it more readable.
Humans are busy, especially professional ones. Humans want to understand what they’re reading without having to work for it. And highly intelligent humans can have cognitive disabilities.
Also, these days, people tend to scan text rather than read it word for word. Readable content can be read quickly. Simple, logical structure and using more common words are also key features of readable content. These strategies make the key information easier to find.
Who needs to worry about readability?
All of us need to take readability into account. If you’re trying to get a message across—if you write stuff, that’s you—your reader will thank you for making it easier to comprehend.
Some of us need to think about it a little harder, depending on the general cognitive levels of our audiences. For this reason, government is one of the worst culprits for missing the memo on readability.
Despite its duty to provide clear information about things that can help the public, or things the public need to do, government continuously sends out complicated information. That said, improvements are thankfully happening across departments’ online channels with the DTA digital services standards.
The art of bureaucratese
When I worked in government communications, we’d call the more complicated communications ‘bureaucratese’. It’s a sort of jargon-filled, dense language, where sentences are allowed to take up 5 lines, and vagueness flows freely. Fixing it up and converting it into beautiful plain English might be my not-so-secret pleasure.
You can also find it in legal writing (legalese), much of what’s written for medical professionals, and other texts intended for an educated audience. Guess what? They prefer to get their information in clear, concise, readable text too.
Mark Morris, former speechwriter for the UK Health Secretary wrote this very entertaining blog post for gov.uk about it all.
In it, he mentions some research by Christopher Trudeau at the Thomas M Cooley Law School in Michigan, which found:
80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English
the more complex the issue, the greater that preference
the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English
How do we measure and fix readability?
If you’re ready to make your content more readable, see my article on how to improve readability scores.
