How to Increase the Ease of Readability

If your audience finds your information difficult to read, you will lose readers and potential clients. A complicated or poorly structured content could have put them off. Therefore, ensuring ease of readability is key to holding your audience’s attention.

Why Is Ease of Readability Important?

Some people might believe that readability is not as important as other factors such as information density and interest. This is not true.

Readability plays a massive role in whether readers will continue reading your content or not. It determines how long people spend on the content, and whether they will share it on social media, review it, or purchase the product.

That is why ensuring reading ease is paramount.

Readability is vital not just for the ease of understanding, but to ensure that people can comprehend an article what it’s intended to convey.

Text that is too complex or hard to understand will lead people to leave your page and return to search results. Users will likely consider your content to be useless if your text scores a low-grade point.

Thus, visitors won’t engage with your website content and will bounce more frequently. To drive traffic and increase conversions, you should always focus on achieving your target audience’s readability expectations.

Readability Score: What Is It?

The readability score tells how easy a document or a piece of prose is to read. It tells about the flow and ease of reading.

When your text has a high readability score, people will be able to understand your sentences easily. You should aim for a score of 60 or higher in most cases. The higher the number, the easier it is to read the document.

People may still understand what you’re saying if readability is low, but it’s likely to be exhausting. You must focus on the substance of your writing rather than the complexity of the vocabulary and sentence structure.

Reading difficulty is associated with a lower readability score. This is mainly because of long sentences that are hard to comprehend. But other factors like big blocks of paragraphs, rich vocabulary knowledge, and sentence structure also affect text readability.

Now, let’s explore the different ways of measuring readability.

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Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

What Are the Criteria for Assessing Readability?

A lot of jargon and slang used in the text can hamper the readability of your content. Improving readability essentially means being clear and concise so that there is minimal difficulty in reading your text.

You can do many things to ease reading such as using shortening sentence length and avoiding common grammatical errors. Choose words that are shorter and have simpler endings than those you typically use.

Another thing to consider is whether your language is passive or active.

To measure readability, essential data is collected about the text, then each element is calculated using a unique mathematical formula or collection of formulas.

Flesch-Kincaid grade level and Fleschuss Reading Easy formulas are the most common. They consider the number of syllables per 100 words and the average number of words per sentence. Software like Microsoft Word commonly utilizes these formulae.

Flesch Reading Ease is a standard measure of readability used for WordPress sites, which helps articles rank higher in search engines like Google. The score measures the difficulty of a reading passage in English — the lower it is, the harder it is.

Why Should You Use Different Readability Formula to Analyze Your Text?

The writing skills of those in different fields with different needs must vary. Writing effectively often requires descriptions of jargon and flow of language, style writing, inflections of voice, and infuriating interpretations of language.

Readability formulas are necessary to assess the text and help readers to follow the text. It increases their understanding of what is being communicated in the text.

Readability metrics such as the Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog index are algorithmic heuristics used to estimate readability. Some use word counts, sentence structures, and syllables, while others use lists of already scored words.

Because the different readability ratings are calculated using various metrics and mathematical formulas. In other words, your results will vary depending on which method you choose.

One text can lead to a score of 9 on one formula and get you enhanced readability. However, the same text can lead to a score of 7 on the other.

Therefore, it’s always helpful to use several readability formulas when analyzing your text.

Wrapping Up

Ease of readability is crucial to the success of any piece of writing to achieve your purpose. Often, you write a document, article, blog post, or essay and want it easy to read, understand, and enjoy.

Utilizing various readability metrics and formulas aids in creating effective and impactful material. However, you should aim for an overall understanding of the text and consider readability an element of the bigger picture.

It will make your writing easy to read and help you understand a language better.

Hope this article gave you an idea of how to increase reading ease so that you can write with ease.

Pam is an expert grammarian with years of experience teaching English, writing and ESL Grammar courses at the university level. She is enamored with all things language and fascinated with how we use words to shape our world.

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