How do you define readability?

Measure, monitor and manage your message’s reading ease

How do you define readability? Readability measures how easy your message is to read. That measurement is based on factors like sentence and word length.

Two elements of readability

Two elements contribute to reading ease, according to readability expert William H. DuBay (PDF): the reader and the writing.

1. The reader. Reader traits that affect readability include:

• Reading skills. Caution: Your reader’s skills might not be as good as you think.
• Prior knowledge. The more they know, the more interested they are. And the higher their reading skill, the more general knowledge they’ll have.
• Interest. How much do they care about, say, the company’s new mission statement?
• Motivation. What carrots and sticks are in play for learning this information?

Easier writing, DuBay writes, can compensate for these issues.

2. The writing. In What Makes a Book Readable, researchers William S. Gray and Bernice Leary identified 228 elements of readability. Then they organized them into four components:

• Content — arguments, structure, coherence
• Style — semantic (words) and syntactic (sentences)
• Design — typography, layout, illustrations
• Organization — chapters, navigation, headings

There’s not a lot you can do about your reader’s skills, knowledge, interest and motivation. But you can make your writing more readable.

Readability tools

The good news is, it is possible to measure, monitor and manage readability to reach more readers. More than 130 years of readability research gives us standards to shoot for. And online readability tools make it easier than ever to make sure we’re meeting these standards.

Among my favorite online readability tools: StoryToolz’ Readability Calculator. (Learn about some of my other favorite tools.)

Plug in a chunk of copy, and STORYtoolz will run it through seven readability indexes. STORYtoolz also delivers a wealth of other readability information. You’ll get 34 pieces of data in all, from your longest sentence length to the number of to be verbs.

Ready? Let’s grab your numbers.

How readable is my message?

Run your message through StoryToolz and capture your numbers here:

Reading levels

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level    __________________________

Flesch Reading Ease               __________________________

(Don’t worry about the others.)

Learn more about readability indexes.

Sentence information

Number of characters              __________________________

Number of words                    __________________________

Characters per word                __________________________

Syllables per word                  __________________________

Number of sentences               __________________________

Words per sentence                 __________________________

Number of short sentences      __________________________

Number of long sentences        __________________________

Number of paragraphs            ___________________________

Sentences per paragraph          __________________________

Number of questions               __________________________

Number of passive sentences  __________________________

Longest sentence                     __________________________

Shortest sentence                     __________________________

Word usage

Number of to be verbs            __________________________

Number of auxiliary verbs      __________________________

Number of conjunctions          __________________________

Number of pronouns               __________________________

Number of prepositions          __________________________

Number of nouned words     __________________________

Learn more about word usage and readability.

Sentence beginnings

Pronouns                                 __________________________

Question pronouns            __________________________

Articles                                    __________________________

Subordinating conjunctions     __________________________

Conjunctions                           __________________________

Prepositions                            __________________________

Learn more about sentence structure and readability.

Now what?

These content metrics and readability formulas will help you measure readability — how easy or difficult to read your message is. Use these readability scores to identify opportunities to make your messages easier to understand. (Tip: High-school grade-level averages are too high for most audiences.)

Learn more about measuring readability.