What Makes Something Readable?
Why are some things readable and others are not? Is it a matter of choice? Or all there rules?
If you use Microsoft Word for writing, you can use Editor, under the Review menu. After you correct or ignore all of the errors, it will tell you how readable your document is. It will give you a reading ease score and a grade level. I translate that score into English. Less than 40 is very technical. 40-49 is medium technical. 50-59 is simple technical. 60-70 is medium. 70-80 is easy. And 81-100 is very easy. The scorers themselves are more stringent. They say that 91-100 is very easy. I think my scale is truer for more people. In other words, I think that people are smarter.
One of the things that the Editor uses to come up with that score is length of sentences. I try to make my paragraphs and sentences shorter. My lengthy Macro (Word Shortcut) highlights long paragraphs, long sentences, and long words with different colors. I consider a paragraph to be long if it contains more than 15 sentences. Sentences are long if they contain more than 18 words. And words are long if they contain more than 12 characters. I often point out the longest word in my books. And usually there are a few long ones. I think that long words are ok, so long as there aren&';t too many of them.
What else makes your document readable? Usage of commas. Too many and the text becomes cluttered. Too few, and you don&';t know when to breathe. White space can make a document readable. Too much or too little, makes it unreadable. Too much or too little depends on the user. I like less. Microsoft and WordPress like more.
Pictures can break things up. They can give a visual aspect to your text. They can make your text more readable. In my blog posts, I place a mostly transparent picture behind the text. This can make your text more appealing to read, so long as it doesn&';t make it too hard to read.
At the top of this article, I listed several scores and their meaning. It would have been easier to read those, if I had placed them each on separate lines. I was going to call that a list. However, they&';re already a list. And that ambiguity would have had some of you wondering.
Proper spelling makes things easier to read. Explaining things that are not readily understandable, or that are technical makes them easier to read. On the other hand, you don&';t want to talk down to your audience.
Perhaps the most determining factor in readability is the length of the document. Too long, and people may not read it. They may also pass it up if it&';s too short. I like to keep my books short to appeal to those with short attention spans. Now, what was I saying?
Humor is helpful too.
What Makes Something Readable
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