Beginners Advice

Are your posts even Readable?

One of the things you should be worried or at least focused on when writing anything albeit a blog post or a company memo is readability. For business’ if your employees can’t understand what you want them to do because your memos are unreadable, that will cause a noticeable decrease in productivity. If you’re a blogger and you write the most informative post ever, its essentially pointless if no one can read it.

The Subjective Viewpoint

It is often times difficult to determine if something one writes is readable, for what makes sense in my head may often make no sense to anyone else when I put it into words. The best solution is to have at least two people read all your writings before you distribute them. A colleague to make sure you have no faults within the actual content and someone not from your field to determine if its easily comprehendable.

The Objective Viewpoint

Of course you don’t always have two people available to review everything you write and reviews from people are often times subjective and while its important to get a subject view on something, it always helps to get the objective stance as well. And that is where Gunning,Fog and Flesch come into play. They are readability algorithims. And with all algorithims there are scripts to easily take advantage of them. The script I use is provided by JuicyStudio and its very easy to use. You just type in your url and press enter.

Click Here to Test your sites readability

Results for DigitalORDER

What Does That All Mean?

The bottom three numbers are the ones you should pay attention to, The Flesch Grade and Fog Index are a rough determination of how many years of school it takes to understand the content. Below is a table of Fog Index’s and what resources should have that index. The Flesch Reading Ease is a 0-100 measure of how easy your content is to read, According to JuicyStudio you should shoot towards at least 60-70 so Im quite proud of having a 72.85.

Fog Index	Resources
6	TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8	Reader’s Digest
8 - 10	Most popular novels
10	Time, Newsweek
11	Wall Street Journal
14	The Times, The Guardian
15 - 20	Academic papers
Over 20	Only government sites can get away with this, because you can’t ignore them.
Over 30	The government is covering something up

Disclaimer: These are mathematical formulae and should be used as tools to help you determine where you are at not tell you how you should write, for if you wrote simply to get a good score ,youd end up with a nonsensical string of text.