For many bloggers the biggest challenges are finding the time, motivation or inspiration to publish on regular basis. Some may simply let flow with whatever’s on their mind at the moment. Others may spend some time researching their topic and working through a series of drafts before publishing, and some may also put some thought into optimizing their page for search engines and/or tagging technologies. For the most part though, it’s an individual effort.
For some organizations publishing content is a group effort, and may include multiple stakeholders across several departments and disciplines such as marketing, legal, human resources, product development, engineering, etc. If SEO is also one of the goals, you can be pretty certain that those responsible for SEO will have anxieties of their own as to how difficult their job will be after everyone else has vetted and blessed the page copy.
If that isn’t enough, there’s another factor that may be forgotten in the process. At various points during the content creation and approval process it might be prudent to stop and check readability levels from the reader perspective. Sometimes you may be so heavily invested in satisfying your internal audience that you might neglect your external audience. There are a number of ways to check this. For example:
- Try reading your copy from the perspective of your intended reader
- Find someone who’s detached from your internal process and ask for their feedback
- Run your text through a readability analysis tool
In many cases the first two may be enough, and a little common sense is all you need, but sometimes you may want a reality check from an impartial tool. Here are some tools that may help.
The Gunning Fog Index and the Flesch Kincaid Readability Test originated from academia, but they can be a useful reality check for marketers. Both tools attempt to measure the grade level required for comprehending your text.
What’s "acceptable" of course depends on your intended audience, but if you’re trying to appeal to a wide audience these tools can at least be an indicator of how broad that appeal actually is. Is your intended audience highly-educated with a 12th grade reading level or higher? Or are you going for a broader appeal where you should assume a middle-school reading level? It just might be that that your copy is well-written by any reasonable standard, but it’s not connecting with that wider group.
Juicy Studio has a tool for running a readability test that gives you a quick score for both the Gunning Fog and Flesch Kincaid scales. Just enter any web page URL. Another readability analysis tool allows you to enter text directly into a field.
You’ll find that there’s not much consistency in the scores generated by these tools. Both sites have some discussion about how their tool works, and what some of the challenges are. It may be best to settle on one or the other and just concern yourself with relative comparisons (if you dig into this topic there are other resources as well).
I did a quick search for how-to pages and decided to test a page called How to Change a Tire. The results seem to indicate that this page will be understandable to a wide audience.
In a previous post I published the output of an automated tool that generates corporate jargon. Just for grins I ran that page through the Juicy Studio tool. This is an extreme and artificial example so the results aren’t surprising.
What’s an appropriate target reading level for your audience? That of course depends on your own scenario.
There’s a new tool that allows you to display your blog’s reading level on your blog (other than "shiny object" fascination, I’m not sure there’s much point). Some bloggers are taken aback that this tool rates them at a lower reading level than they’d imagined. But is that a bad thing?
I’ve found that it takes some work to find some authoritative sources on the topic. I’ve seen snippets here and there that assert that by lowering the reading level on your copy, you’re not just appealing to the lowest common denominator. Just because some of your readers may have a higher reading level, doesn’t mean that your copy will have no appeal to them. On the contrary, in a medium in which people are surfing and scanning and making rapid decisions, easier-to-read copy may appeal to them as well.
In my own research health educators turn up repeatedly as having given this issue some real thought. In an article entitled 97% of Patient Education Materials Don’t Work …Do Yours? Dr. Dorothy Smith says:
The average consumer reads between the 6th and 8th grade levels. Yet studies show that most patient education materials are written at the 9th grade to college reading level. This means patients can’t understand them.
If you’re willing to accept the statement that "the average consumer reads between the 6th and 8th grade levels", then maybe it’s worth considering the implications to your own written communications. I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily an issue to obsess about – just something to keep in mind to help keep your organization from focusing too narrowly on your internal audience.
