Using strong verbs, good analogies, pithy quotations
Eliminating clichés and waffly throat-clearing
Credible data from the real world
Citing believable authorities
Well-written introductions, titles and subheads
Making the first and last sentence of each paragraph especially clear
The first step to changing something is to measure it. Readability statistics, such as the Flesch Grade Level etc. These tools give you objective feedback on how readable your text is by measuring word length, number of syllables, words per sentence and per paragraph. By comparing these measures against tested reference material, they give you a reading age or score for your text. They don’t ‘read’ the text, just analyse it using a set of rules. They are a useful benchmark and give helpful feedback, but don’t rely on them to the exclusion of good judgement. Microsoft Word has a tool that will give similar results. You can get a readability plug-in for WordPress (my blogging tool of choice). There is an online readability checker on my website. It checks web pages or pasted text. Today’s exercise is to take a piece of existing text, perhaps from your current work or from a business website, and edit it to improve readability. Use a readability checker on it before you start to get a baseline score and see if you can improve that score by a grade level.
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