By Kevin Gault
We’ve all seen this type of white paper: Well-researched and well-organized, but so wordy and overloaded with business jargon that reading it gives you a headache.
No matter how complex your topic—or how sophisticated your reader—to be instantly understood, your copy must be easy to read. In his book, The Art of Readable Writing, author Rudolph Flesch, a readability expert and writing consultant, gives tips on making your copy effortless to read.
Heard of the Flesch Readability Score? If you run a grammar check in Microsoft Word, you will see his work in action.
In his book, Flesch lists more than 20 “Rules of Effective Writing.” Here are some highlights that may be familiar, but are worth revisiting:
* Write like you speak
* Use contractions
* Use the active voice
* Keep sentences and paragraphs short
Flesch states that a key factor in readability is the average length of sentences. Writing that is easy to read has sentences that average 8 words. Writing of standard difficulty goes to 17 words per sentence. Difficult-to-read writing runs on for 29 or more words per sentence.
Flesch adds that writing to be understood takes more than using short words and short sentences. He recommends putting the “human factor” into your writing.
His “human-interest quotient” is the number of personal words (e.g., personal pronouns) and quotations you use, and how often you engage the reader by challenging, questioning or directly addressing him or her.
To capture the reader’s interest, Flesch gives these tips:
* Focus on your reader, not on yourself
* Help your reader read (emphasize, anticipate, repeat, summarize)
* Don’t write down to your reader
* Rearrange paragraphs for emphasis
Flesch considers another tip so important that it rates an exclamation point in his book: Specify! He says using specifics is “the most important rule to follow in all of your written communications.”
“Stay away from generalities in all of your writing,” he advises. “Concentrate on giving details-names, dates, places, facts and figures. Focus on the visible, audible and measurable. Pass on your direct experience, rather than your thoughts, opinions and general ideas.”
The next time you sit down to write a white paper, keep this readability expert’s tips in mind. Use conversational tone. Be careful about sentence length. Engage the reader. Use specifics.
As Flesch says, it’s easy to write convoluted copy that’s a struggle to read. Writing clearly is much more difficult: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace,” he says. “Making the complicated simple, that takes creativity.”
April 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am
This is a very helpful article, but I find it ironic that an article written by a “readability expert” would be posted in gray letters on a light background and the link to it in a sort of pale mustard yellow, also on a light background.
A little bit of contrast please, for eyes that are not so young or not so good.
June 14th, 2008 at 4:30 am
There’s a TRUTH to writing “Simply.” When expository language is phraysed as perfectly as it can be said there is great ease to the reading. Each word weighed to its perfection. Now, I’ve just used the the words “expository language”, and I hold that’s simplisity, because, dear reader, you are here, and we are brothers along the trail of glory, and that says it best for us. I also hold the visual interface of this site is the Pitz. We are to bring order and ballance and beauty into the future as it breaks upon the ever expanding Glory. “That is all we know, and all we need to know.” Fond surfing……….