When I was a student journalist at McKean High School in Hockessin, Delaware, I was thrilled to be learning the tricks of the trade. I was eager to study style guides and practice inverted pyramids for the opportunity to write for a living – and to follow in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.
The first disappointment of my journalistic career came when our teacher served up this golden rule: Newspapers must be written for the sixth to eighth grade reading level. For gosh sake, I was a high school junior at the time and the last thing I wanted to do was write below my own level! It was unimaginable to me that the average reader could be as dull as the nose pickers at the junior high two miles away.
I was all arrogance and disbelief until I realized I’d be writing for people like my dad. Raised in a poor family and forced to quit school in seventh grade to help pay the bills, he struggled with reading for most of his life.
From that point on, I relished my role – writing simply so others could simply understand. Today, as Managing Editor of Microsoft IT, I’m still passionate about readability. I believe we are obliged to respect our readers by writing clearly for them.
So how smart do your readers have to be in order to understand you? Do you make them work to comprehend your message? Do you risk their displeasure at your tortured sentence structure? Worse, do you risk them ignoring what you write?
Back in high school, we pretty much guessed at what the eighth grade level sounded like. We were instructed to write simple sentences. We learned not to use $15 words when a $.50 word would do just fine. We were reminded that Shakespeare wrote for the masses – and that he was very popular, indeed.
Sold yet? How about if I offer you an easy-to-use tool that will help you analyze how readable your writing really is? Great! Just follow these instructions:
- Click the Microsoft Office Button in Word, and then click Word Options.
- Click Proofing.
- Make sure Check grammar with spelling is selected.
- Under When correcting grammar in Word, select the Show readability statistics check box.
When I ran the readability check on this entry, it scored at a 7.4 grade level.
To learn more about Word’s readability scores, go to Microsoft online.
For a contrarian view on readability, read Tim Porter’s blog entry about the role of readability in newspapers’ demise in the age of digital media.
PS — I am proud to say that by the time my father was in middle age, he had become a very good reader and earned his GED with my mother’s unwavering support and encouragement.
Suzi Beerman 