Ever wondered what we write is easy to understand or is too complex
for our target audience. Lot of people have a flair for writing and
some are professionally involved in creating content either for a blog,
news article, training material, etc. Whatever the need maybe, we do
keep the target audience in mind and create our content accordingly by
following some guidelines & checklists. However there are
certain readability standards which can really help you as well as your
readers connect even better by helping you write content that they will
easily comprehend.
Since last couple of days, I have been doing some quick research on the readability standards, tests, formulae, etc. And I came across a ton of them with each having a different take on how to assign a readability score to the content that you have created. To name a few, there is Lexile, Spasch, Flesch Grade Level, Fry Graph, ARI, etc. Some of these are quite sophisticated while some are quite straight-forward & easy to follow & use.
These standards basically provide your content with a score which is calculated by using a formula & parameters like your content’s word, sentence, character, syllable count. Some formulae provide you with a detailed analysis like word frequency, mostly used words, longest sentence & even suggest you to rewrite a particular sentence or part for better readability.
An interesting fact that came across is that there are some standard & defined sets of words which should be used to make your language more legible and some formulae help you check your write-up against those sets also.
The graphic below suggests that this article should be easily understood by a 17-18 year old reader and it displays various readability scores based on different formulae —
