readability Archives - Write for Results

How to double your readability score

The other day, I spoke about a webinar that I ran for a client. I had sent them a very short paragraph written in corporate gobbledygook, and their mission—should they have chosen to accept it—was to rewrite it in plain English. That meant using simple, jargon-free language. Using the readability stats in Word, everybody, without exception, managed to double their readability as measured by the Flesch reading ease score. In Kelly’s case, her results were simply stunning.

So what I’d like to do is share with you her original rewrite, along with its readability score. Then I’ll share her ultimate version, with amazing readability.

Kelly’s paragraph, with low readability

This was Kelly’s original rewrite:

‘We’re excited to create our new e-business strategy. And we’d like to get your ideas on how we can shape our new strategy.’ (So she changed the tone of voice a little bit, quite rightly trying to make it more inspirational and direct using ‘you’ and ‘your’, in second person singular. Then she goes on to write…) ‘To help inspire you, our objective is online innovation, supporting profitability, customer acquisition…and brand enhancement must continue to drive what we do. We must also set clear targets that are achievable, and demonstrate our capabilities’. I like the beginning of that, where she’s using a contraction. ‘We’re excited to create our new business strategy and we’d like to get your ideas’. So that’s nice and human and conversational, but then to my ear, at least, it sort of lapses into a kind of management-speak with ‘online innovation, customer acquisition and brand enhancement’. And then she talks about ‘demonstrating our capabilities’ which is not really plain English.

Now, when we score the readability on that, her average sentence length (ASL) was just within range at 19.6 words, but her average characters per word ran to 5.1 which is a little bit too high. That immediately indicates to me that she’s using needlessly formal, polysyllabic words. As a result, her readability score was only 36%.

So we worked on it together, just for a few minutes, proving that this stuff is so easy. You know, writing with impact, writing concisely, writing with personality and power is not rocket science. This is a learnable skill.

Doubled readability in Kelly’s revision

Here is Kelly’s revised version:

‘We’re excited about creating a new e-business strategy and we’d like your ideas to help shape it. To help you, our main goal is online innovation. That will help you to win new customers, build your brand and make more money. Hitting these targets will show that we have the right mix of skills.’

So I slightly changed just a couple of the words there but you get the idea. It’s shorter. It’s more concise. We’ve kept the the contractions, which renders it conversational and human. And in fact, that first line has got quite a nice rhythm to it. ‘We’re excited about creating our new e-business strategy and we’d like your ideas to help shape it.’ There’s a bit of a rhythm there. And then we’ve got a short sentence ‘To help you, our main goal is online innovation’. Okay, full stop. ‘We’d like you to focus…’ Because she used the word focus which is a S.O.W. (Severely Over-used Word), I just replaced that on the hoof. ‘That will help you to win new customers…’ here we have verbs, including ‘build’ and ‘make more money’.

So can you hear that? Hear the difference between ‘supporting profitability, customer acquisition and brand enhancement…’ in the first version? ‘To win new customers, build your brand and make more money’? You know, it’s plainer English. It’s simpler and more powerful. Much easier to read.

We decided to launch the last sentence with a gerund, which is a verbal noun: ‘Hitting these targets will show…’, rather than ‘demonstrate’. ‘Show’ is one syllable, ‘demonstrate’ is three syllables. Use the simpler word: ‘Hitting these targets will show that we have the right mix of skills’, rather than ‘We must also set clear targets that are achievable and demonstrate our capabilities.’

The overwhelming readability preference

Don’t know about you, but I certainly know which style of writing I’d prefer to read. That later, ultimate version that Kelly created had an average sentence length of 14 words, which is brilliant. Average characters per word dropped from 5.1 to 4.5 because she started using simpler, shorter words and simpler language. As a result of that, we doubled her readability. It went from 36% to just under 72%, which is well within plain English.

Hats off to Kelly, who just showed how easy it was, with brilliant results. I would say we did that in a total elapsed time of 10 or 15 minutes. That’s how easy this stuff is! I really want to impress upon you that the ability to write with impact, power and personality is an eminently learnable skill that is within everybody’s gifts. So on that note—that hopefully inspiring note—I’m going to leave it there for now.

Thank you, Kelly, for being a brilliant delegate.

This readability article has been taken directly from Episode 146 of The Writing Guy podcast. Please have a listen if you’d like.

I’m Scott Keyser, The Writing Guy, helping smart professionals to find their voice, write Human and get the results they want from the words they write. Interested in transforming your writing? Then please get in touch for a relaxed, no-obligation chat with Scott. Simply send an email to scott@writeforresults.com.

Scott Keyser In Write for Results

A quick cure for wordiness and wind

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Last week I ran a webinar for a longstanding client. We had eight people on the call and were using the Readability Stats in Word to track improvements in their readability score for each successive version of a re-writing exercise I’d set them. The exercise was to ‘translate’ a piece of corporate gobbledygook, riddled with wordiness, into good, old fashioned, mid-register plain English.

The Readability Stats in Word are really useful. They give you a percentage score (called the ‘Flesch Reading Ease’) based on the work of a psychologist called Dr. Rudolph Flesch, a clever man. A Viennese Jew who fled Nazism in the 1930s, Flesch settled in Manhattan and spent the rest of his life there studying readability and writing some really good books about it. This is how Readability Stats look:

wordiness scott keyser

How to Diagnose Wordiness

Within 90 minutes, everybody on the call had raised their FRE from mid- to late-20% — which is pretty poor — to 60% and beyond. All the delegates saw their readability double and, in a few cases, triple. According to the Stats, plain English — which most B2B writers should be writing, but don’t — starts at an FRE of 60%. It’s rare for business writers to hit the heights of plain English, believe me.

In the readability stats, you need to be aware of four numbers or ‘ratios’. Well, five, if you include word count, but I’m sure you already know how to do that. The four numbers to look out for are:

1. average words per sentence (ASL), which should be 15–20 words
2. Flesch Reading Ease, which is a percentage, with plain English kicking in at 60%
3. the proportion of your sentences in the passive voice, which should be as close as possible to 0%
4. average characters per word (circled in red in the Stats below)

I want to focus on the fourth one.

Wordiness: A Closer Look

What I noticed during last week’s webinar (and for many years before that) is that almost all the delegates were using business-speak, buzzwords and ‘MBA-itis’. Besides being honking great clichés that make readers’ eyes glaze over, these words are long and push the average number of characters per word up to 5.0 and beyond.

But even without reading the text, merely by looking at that fourth number, I knew what the problem was. They were being needlessly wordy, formal and verbose. Despite paying lip-service to the concept of plain English, they weren’t using it.

Instead they were writing stuff like ‘We are committed to focusing on this strategic priority…bla-bla-bla.’ This isn’t just wordiness, it’s as far away from plain English as Z is from A.

In some cases I think the number was more like 5.7 or even 6.0 . And even though that may not sound like a lot, the moment your average characters per word goes above 5.0, you’re in trouble. That flatulent troll (‘Windy’) has grabbed you by the ankles and is dragging you — and your readability — down.

An Equation to Combat Wordiness

As I was thinking about this all-too-common problem with business writing, I was reminded of an important equation we’d all do well to remember:

The value to the reader of your content should always be greater than the energy they need to expend to get that content:

Value of content to reader > energy needed to get the content

Another way of putting it: the value to the reader of your content should be a multiple of the brain calories they expend to get it. The less readable your writing, the harder you make it for your reader. And the likelier you are to lose them. They may never revisit your writing again, which would be a sorry state of affairs. Don’t let it get to that…or Windy may crush you underfoot.

wordiness scott keyser

Thank you for joining me in this jaunt through wordiness and its remedies. Should you have questions regarding plain English, winning bids, nailing pitches…anything related to writing…please contact me and we’ll chat. I also invite you to connect with me on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Scott Keyser is The Writing Guy, helping smart professionals find their voice, write Human and change the world with their words. He issues a daily podcast, The Writing Guy.

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