Readability

Introduction

According to the Literacy Project Foundation, text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level around 8th. Roughly 50% of US adults cannot read and comprehend a book written at an 8th-grade level.

The Nielsen Norman Group found that most web visitors will only read about 20% of a web page, and, according to Time Magazine the majority of users spend fewer than 15 seconds on a page.


Basics

Every page that you are creating should have an intended audience and you'll want to write in a way that your audience can understand. While developing the tone and content of your page is entirely up to you, here are a couple of tools that can help you tailor your page to the intended audience.


How To

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear. It's like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose. Too often, our words are like our thoughts — innumerable and disorganized. Almost any bit of writing could use some cutting. Less is more, etc.

So, the Hemingway Editor will highlight (in yellow and red) where your writing is too dense. Try removing needless words or splitting the sentence into two. Your readers will thank you.

Readable.com

Readable's text scoring tool is designed to tell you how easy a piece of text is to read and provide tips for improving your readability. Readability scores are a way to measure whether written information is likely to be understood by the intended reader. Readable is a set of tools designed to help you to write great content.

Grammarly

The Grammarly Chrome Extension will make sure your messages, documents, and social media posts are clear, mistake-free, and impactful. Adding Grammarly to Chrome means that your spelling and grammar will be vetted on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, and nearly everywhere else you write on the web.



Page last modified July 29, 2021