Readability metrics: Are they getting your message?

What is “readability” and why is it important? According to the encyclopedia, “Readability is a measure of the accessibility of a piece of writing, indicating how broad an audience it will reach. Readability is a judgment of how easy a text is to understand.” [Wikipedia 2006]

Because it is important? Well, of all the confusing uncertainties about whether your marketing message or website copy is the right one to get the job done, one thing you can be sure of is whether your readers can understand it. Your writing ability can be good, bad, or indifferent, but you can be absolutely sure that if they can’t read you, you don’t stand a chance.

tools of the trade

While copywriting itself is as much an art as it is a science, fortunately, readability metrics are easy to calculate, simple to interpret, and they don’t lie. Most of us don’t use them, but we should. This is the minimum: how many of your readers can “get” what you are writing. The tools to determine this are easily accessible, free, and easy to use.

In Tools in Word, your spell checker will calculate some summary counts and averages, as well as two readability metrics if you check “Check Readability Statistics” under Spelling and Grammar Options. But it does the latter, so you have to go through the whole spell checker first. Although it might not be such a bad idea…

Far more powerful, however, is an excellent free tool from Readability.info. This online resource calculates readability scores for Word files and entire websites in no time. As they say: “By comparing the readability score of different documents (or web pages), you can better hone your writing and make sure you’re not creating sentences and paragraphs that are too complex for your audience.”

Specifically, the tool provides the following readability and associated metrics:

• Readability indices
• Prize Information
• Word Usage Information
• awards starts

Another free tool that’s not as powerful but certainly useful (and you probably haven’t heard of it before) is Future Now online. us-us calculator. No, it is not a urine test for illegal drugs! This nifty tool analyzes the words on your site to see if you’re mostly talking about your customers and their needs or if you’re mostly talking about yourself.

We are quite proud of our business, products and services. But, naturally, clients don’t care much for that (strange, isn’t it?). Rather, they are very interested in themselves and their own wants and needs. Future Now’s quick analysis can help you adjust that balance. You will probably be surprised by the objective analysis.

readability scores

This is a good time to review the various popular readability indices, all of which are calculated by the Readability.info tool. Some take a different approach or measure things a bit differently, and in any case, everyone selects just a few favorites that they regularly trust. Are here:

Tea Automated Readability Index (ARI) is designed to measure the understandability of a text. Like many of the other indices, its output is a rough representation of the US grade level needed to understand the text. Unlike the other indices, the ARI, along with the Coleman-Liau, is based on a factor of characters per word, rather than the usual syllables per word. Formula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Readability_Index

Tea Coleman–Liau index It was designed to measure the comprehensibility of a text. Like the ARI but unlike most other indices, Coleman-Liau is based on characters rather than syllables per word. Although opinion varies on its accuracy compared to the syllable/word and complex word indices, computer programs count characters more easily and accurately than syllables. Formula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman-Liau_Index

Tea Flesch-Kincaid readability tests they are designed to indicate how difficult it is to understand a reading passage. There are two tests, the Flesch Index of Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score. Supposedly these are the same measures, just placed on a different scale, but the results of the two tests don’t always correlate closely. Formula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test

Tea Shot Fog Index It is a test that indicates the number of years of formal education that a person requires to easily understand a text on the first reading. That is, if a passage has a fog index of 12, it has the reading level of a US high school student. The test was developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman, in 1952. Texts that are designed to a wide audience generally require a fog index of less than 12. Formula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning-Fog_Index

Tea laesbarhedsindex The Readability Formula (LIX) is useful because it is simple and can be used in documents of any Western European language. The test calculates an index score for a sample of text based on the length of the sentence and the number of long words (that is to say, words containing seven or more characters). Formula: [http://www.oleandersolutions.com/lix.html]

SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook) is a widely used readability formula that estimates the years of education required to understand a piece of writing. It produces an extraordinarily high correlation of 0.985 with the scores of readers who understood 100% of the exam materials. G. Harry McLaughlin invented it in 1969 as a more accurate and easier to calculate substitute for the Gunning-Fog_Index. Formula:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMOG_%28Simple_Measure_Of_Gobbledygook%29

What is good?

A “good” score, of course, depends on your target audience, your chosen style (part of the brand), and what you intend to do. But there are some general rules. According to Future Now [2006] referring to various published studies, an “ideal writing standard” might be as follows:

• No more than 4.25 characters per word.
• No more than 5% passive voice.
• Not less than 80% readability.
• A Flesch-Kincaid grade level between 4 and 65 (the sky’s the limit, it seems…)
• A fog index above 13 puts you in the danger zone.

While the grade level seems arbitrary depending on who your target audience is, it should be said that the average for best sellers is around grade level 4, newspapers around grade level 6, and business books 7-8. . Lower than you might have thought.

Sure, your audience can read at higher levels, but you want your message to be easy to read. If your readability scores seem seriously out of line with your audience’s abilities, Future Now offers some strategies for making amends:

• Rewrite passive sentences so that they become active sentences.
• Eliminate unnecessary words like “the” or “an,” extraneous words like “it,” adjectives that don’t have significant impact, or anything that doesn’t help your message.
• Replace 50-cent words with 5-cent words as long as the difference is not critical to their style or meaning.
• Let your verbs do the work that you would otherwise assign to your adjectives.
• Take the time to learn how your customers talk about your product or service so that you can write to them in the language they actually use.

Just a piece of the puzzle

Obviously this is just a quick introduction to the topic. But taking a closer look at your text content in a quantitative way may provide you with some surprises, as well as hints on adjustments you may wish to make. While there are solid guidelines, in general, there is no “good” or “bad” score, it all depends on what you want to achieve.

If you’re targeting the widest possible audience, then what you want is the lowest reasonable rating level. If this is a serious enough discussion for a B2B audience, then you might not want to simplify your content, but rather aim for a grade 8-10 level of understanding. It all depends.

Terms like “Behavioral Targeting Monetization” or even more complex ones may not appeal to readability programs, but you know to use them in certain circumstances. “Metric” is a terribly useful word, but one that is unfamiliar to most people at first. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And, of course, these numbers aren’t the only critical element in your writing: “Obviously, numbers alone can’t make you a good writer. Many other factors contribute to readable and understandable writing.” We could also add “cash” in there.

These factors include not only what good copywriters do, but also things like font, size, color, placement, etc. in your presentation or website design. Even the day and time you send an email marketing message. There are many pieces to this puzzle and the more you know about each one, the better your chances of success!

References

Future Now. “Can your clients read what you write?” GrokDotCom Volume 139 09/15/06.
http://grokdotcom.com/Volumes/index.htm

“readability,” Wikipedia 03/10/06. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability