My challenge for this article: write at an eighth-grade level.

Why would I want to do that? Well, to make this easy to read – and understand. It’s the difference between me telling you:

Your content is useless if your readers can’t read or understand your message. (grade 7.6 reading level)

and

The effectiveness of your content is endangered when its measure of difficulty exceeds the ability of your audience to consume or comprehend it. (grade 14.9 reading level)

In short: readability matters. It’s the difference between someone actually reading your content, or giving up and clicking away. And it could help you stand out from the pack that uses writing that gets in the way.

What is readability?

To sum it up, readability tells us how easy it is for people to understand written text. This is usually shown as a number or grade level that tells us “someone in grade X should be able to read this.”

There are scales that help us figure out readability, but they basically come down to a few factors: word length (in syllables or characters), sentence length, and vocabulary. Use common words and keep your sentences short for best results.

Just don’t confuse readability with comprehension or effectiveness (though it certainly helps both). Scores don’t tell you a whole lot about the quality of your content.

And don’t get it mixed up with the complexity of your ideas. You can still communicate deep, intertwining thoughts in simple ways.

Your audience is your guide

What’s the perfect number? There’s lots of advice out there based on who you’re writing for, and most suggest an eighth-grade level when you’re writing for a general audience. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty, but it has a lot to do with:

• Literacy levels (your content can be read by the majority of the population)
• Comfort (we actually find it preferable to read below our ability)
• Attention span (we’re practically goldfish when we read onli- oh look, a squirrel!)

Context matters, too. If you expect someone to follow instructions on a mobile app, for example, better bump that number down to about a sixth-grade level, says web content expert Jakob Neilsen. They’re focused on a task, and your text is just getting in the way if they have to change gears to read through it.

Ditto for headlines. You’re vying for attention among everyone else vying for attention. If you can’t get your message across in a way someone can understand immediately while skimming, you’re probably not going to get it. Sixth grade works well here, too.

That doesn’t mean low scores are always better. High scores make sense for legal documents, academic studies, and probably business reports, too. You can expect your readers to share similar levels of education and industry knowledge. That’s why the number one lesson is to understand your audience.

Putting it to the test

For most public-facing content, the magic number lays between grade six and eight reading levels. But what does it actually look like out there? Does successful content actually follow that?

Originally, I expected yes. You see the advice everywhere. It was what I learned in journalism school. But when I looked at samples of different types of writing and measured them against the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale, I found the numbers tell a different story.

The only group that stuck to that guideline was fiction authors (who actually clocked in lower). Listicles and quick tips came really close, so kudos to those writers, too.

But blogs, advice articles, news – and even non-fiction – are firmly in the high school range. See for yourself: I put the ranges of each category I looked at, along with the average score, into perspective:

(I have so much more to say about this exercise – but this post is not the place. Look forward to some thoughts in the future, though!)

Stand out by writing simpler

This exercise changed my perspective a little, and it should change yours, too. It doesn’t mean we’re really bad at writing simple copy. it just means there’s room to do better and set yourself apart from the pack.

Case in point: Microsoft Window’s terms of service agreement clocked in at grade 10.9. That’s well below the average, and is much lower than I expected for a category so famously lengthy and complex. Compared to the average, it’s clear they’re making an effort to simplify their wording, which I think we can all thank them for (though it’s still a long read).

Test your own copy

I checked out some different readability measurements and tools for this post. The real workhorse was Microsoft Word, which includes the Flesch-Kincaid grade level and reading ease scales as part of its spelling and grammar check (hidden under Preferences > Spelling & Grammar > “Show readability statistics” if you want to give it a go).

Readable.io deserves a shout-out, too. I used it to check this post. Not only does it show different scales side-by-side but also pointed out other embarrassing errors you’ll never know I made.

Note: This article is a grade 7.6 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale. Mission: success!

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Notes about the chart

You might be wondering about the data behind the chart. Here’s a little more about the process I used and assumptions I made.

Samples: I took 10 samples of content from each category

• Young adult fiction: first few chapters or published excerpts from bestselling books written specifically for teenagers
• Children’s fiction: first few chapters or published excerpts from bestselling books written specifically for children between 7 and 12
• General fiction: first few chapters or published excerpts from bestselling books written for a general adult audience
• Non-fiction books: first few chapters or published excerpts from bestselling books written for a general adult audience
• Listicles and tips: any online article that is a collection of list items or tips, from websites like Buzzfeed, Ranker, etc.
• Blogs and advice: content published on popular blogs like Huffington Post, Techcrunch, etc.
• News articles: hard news about world events from established Canadian news sites, including The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Sun, among others.
• Business documents: Business plans, annual reports, internal memos and the like from actual businesses that exist in real life. Excludes legal documentation.
• Academic publications: articles written by academic researchers on a variety of topics (including science, politics, and art) and accepted for publication in an academic journal
• Terms of service documents: language from popular applications and services from software providers like Google, Netflix and AirBnb
• Legal documentation: taken from samples of existing documentation such as non-disclosure agreements and purchasing contracts from known companies.

Scoring: I ran entire documents through Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker to determine the Flesh-Kincaid grade level score. When full documents were not available (basically just books), I used excerpts released by the publisher.

What could be improved? I would love to:

• Have more samples for more precise results
• Compare different readability scoring systems