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What Do You Mean? How to be Sure Your Readers Understand You

Communicating is difficult at the best of times. When our topic is complex and, let’s be honest, boring, the job is even harder. In this article, we will tackle one very useful technique for ensuring the readers of your financial reports and budget books understand what you are attempting to convey.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

—George Bernard Shaw

As we have discussed in previous posts, text is one of the three essential tools at your disposal when trying to communicate non-verbally. Recall, the purpose of text is to:

introduce a topic, a problem, a business process, or other item that the reader might not be fully conversant in,

explain a graph or a table so the reader does not miss any nuances, highlight or call out a particular point in a table or graph, label a specific data point in a graph or columns or rows in a table,

recommend appropriate next steps or actions.

When using text, however, not all words or the sentences they create are equal.

Readability

Readability is the degree that the prose you write can be understood. Readability is influenced by: word length, use of conventional or unique words, sentence length, number of clauses in each sentence,

number of syllables in each sentence,

A common, but bad habit for writers is to prefer longer, wordier, and more complex text. In almost all cases, this is a mistake. When trying to communicate complex information, as is often the case for finance and budget officers, focus on simplicity. Simplicity makes understanding easier and faster for your reader. After all, who has not abandoned reading an article because it was too long or too hard to follow? Some tips to consider and to improve the readability of your text: avoid jargon and acronyms, omit unnecessary words, use shorter sentences,

consider the reading level of your audience.

Testing Readability

If you want to improve readability, test your text. There are numerous readability-formulas and tools you can use. One popular formula is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. It attempts to measure the approximate grade level required to understand the text.

There are numerous tools that will use this and other formulas on your text. From tools that only test the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (ReadabilityFormulas.com) to broader tools that also assess grammar more generally (Grammarly & Readable) there are many options to choose from. The results of testing your text can be surprising.