On Saturday I saw an interesting comment in the Guardian from a tutor on a creative writing course. She claimed that to write a commercially successful novel you need to keep your language and structure very simple. Simple enough for an 11 year old to understand, since that's the average reading age of adults in this country.
I've never really understood what 'reading age' meant, but can this really be true? To find the answer I went to the website of the National Literacy Trust, where it's stated that in fact one in six adults in the UK have the reading ability expected of an 11 year old, or less. Still not great. But then I followed a link to the University of Nottingham's SMOG calculator where you can paste in samples of text to see just how readable they are. (SMOG stands for Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook!) As benchmarks, they tell us SMOG scores of newspaper editorials. The Sun scores under 14, the Daily Express under 16 and the Telegraph & the Guardian under 18.
I compared two samples - the first from a letter that a client had asked me to edit/redraft, the second was my redraft. Thankfully, my re-write had reduced the SMOG score from 18.5 to 14.3, although it probably could have been even better.
Vocabulary, sentence length and structure aren't the only things to affect readability. Factors such as the font size and typeface, line spacing, layout and surface finish all play a part. If you're interested in knowing more about how to make written material easy to understand I recommend downloading the (free) Readability leaflet from NIACE.
Don't get me wrong - I don't advocate dumbing down. I believe strongly that the only way to improve confidence and skills in reading and writing is to read good writing, and lots of it. It's OK to start with JK Rowling and Dan Brown, but sooner or later the aim should be to lose the waterwings and start swimming with Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy.
However, as marketers and communicators we're not writing great literature. We have no choice but to reduce complexity, respect readibility factors and keep it simple if we want to get our messages across.
You can check your readability score in word when you check spelling and grammar – add in “check grammar with spelling” and “show readability statistics” This gives you feedback on whether you’ve made it too complicated straight away, so you don’t have to do a second test.
I used to do this all the time, and just remembered it now, so I can do it again – cheers Robin
That’s handy to know – thanks, Julia.