Industry jargon does 2 key things. It makes people who know it feel important, and it makes people who don’t know it feel excluded. The key thing it doesn’t do is make it easier for your intended audience to understand what you’re saying!
Flesch Reading Ease
This problem isn’t new. In fact, the Associated Press organisation was thinking about it in 1940, as they tried to sell more newspapers by learning more about what kind of language their readers were capable of understanding.
Enter Rudolf Flesch, a refugee from Nazi Austria, with a PhD in Library Sciences from Columbia University. He created the Flesch Reading Ease formula as part of his dissertation, Marks of a Readable Style. The formula considers factors like personal pronouns, prefixes, and word length to generate a score between 1 and 100, with a higher-scoring text being easier to read. (This paragraph scores 49.)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
The only drawback with Flesch’s Ease method was that the result needed to be translated. For a while, this was done using a separate table to turn the 1 to 100 score into a grade like those used in US public schools.
In the 1970s, the US Navy built on Flesch’s system to create the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
This formula gives a result of between 1 and 18. With US school grades starting at age 5, writing with a score of 8 should be easy to read for a 13-year-old.
Well, that makes perfect sense, not.
At first glance, the formulas and the output may not seem to make sense. But, the building bricks that make up both Flesch scores are straightforward and based on two factors:
- Sentence length. As judged by the average number of words in a sentence
- Word length. As judged by the average number of syllables in a word
Sentences that contain a lot of words are more difficult to grasp than shorter sentences. And similarly, words that contain a lot of syllables are harder to read than words that use fewer syllables. For example, “it was a lackadaisical attempt” is more difficult to read than “it was a lazy attempt”.
What should I aim for?
The average reading age in the UK is that of a 9-year-old. So depending on your audience, that is your benchmark. Anything over grade 8 and you are alienating a large audience. Interestingly, The Guardian has a reading age of 14 and the Sun has a reading age of 8. If you know your audience well you can start writing content that is much easier for them to read and in turn produce better results.
Do I have to do the maths myself?
No, there are plenty of tools out there to save you digging out the calculator. Starting with Spotler’s very own custom tool!
Our tool lets you set a target grade before you start, and analyses the sentiment behind your content. It also shows you the key words in your text (based on how often they are used), so you can follow your SEO strategy into the bargain!
There’s also Microsoft Word:
- Go to File > Options.
- Select Proofing.
- Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, make sure to select the Check grammar with spelling check box.
- Select Show readability statistics.
Here are the results for this blog. Seems like we’re doing ok!
If you aren’t using Microsoft Office, then Grammarly and Hemingway are good places to start.
Is Flesch-Kincaid the only readability metric?
No, there are all sorts of different options out there once you start digging. You may come across Klose Tests, the SMOG Index, and many others.
We like Flesch-Kincaid because it is the best all-rounder. It can be usefully applied to text in any industry or format to set a decent benchmark.
What should I do with this knowledge?
Whatever content you are writing, readability needs to be one of the first things you think about. If your audience struggles to read your content, they won’t click your CTA’s, or even hang around on your site for very long.
So if you’re getting very high bounce rates on your web pages, low Click-Through Rates on your emails, or no engagement with your paid ads, start by taking a look at your readability score.
