Blog Writing for Readability

For years now Hubby has been trying to convince me that my writing style is a little...convoluted. Complex. Confusing.

Since writing isn't really his "thang", I've always disagreed with him and insisted that writing well takes time and lots of words and stuff. You know. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases and clauses and such. And he always argues, "Less is more." He keeps telling me I use ten words when I could use five.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a blog with a box like this one in the sidebar and it made me curious. So of course I clicked on the link and was directed to a page titled "The Blog Readability Test". It asks the question, "What level of education is required to understand your blog?" and offers a tempting box in which to enter your blog's URL and then your rating will magically appear.

Well this is interesting, I thought. I'd read that most successful journalists and writers write at an elementary school level so that they can be easily understood by more people. (Except for the Wall Street Journal's reporters; they try to confuse you as much as possible.)

So I typed in my blog's URL and got a nasty surprise. I tried it again to be sure. Same result. Drat!

Then I tried the test on some of my favorite blogs to see how they were rated. Pioneer Woman tested at the desirable elementary school level. So did Antique Mommy and Chickens in the Road. Guess they're doing something right.

If you're curious like me and wondered how these tests work, you might want to look at this website. It gives a breakdown of how readability scores are tabulated (they were originally designed to sort out books for reading levels in schools). Pioneer Woman's readability chart looks something like this:

Summary	Value
Total Sentences	2
Total Words	17
Average words per Sentence	8.50
Words with 1 Syllable	13
Words with 2 Syllables	3
Words with 3 Syllables	1
Words with 4 or more Syllables	0
Percentage of words with 3 or more Syllables	5.88%
Average Syllables per Word	1.29
Gunning Fog Index	5.75
Flesch Reading Ease	88.73
Flesch-Kincaid Grade	3.00

Which translates to the fact that you only need three years of schooling in order to understand Pioneer Woman's blog. She'll be so thrilled.

The bottom line is that for maximum readability, your blog's content should have shorter sentences made up of short words. Wait! Let's rewrite that sentence. "To be clear and simple, write short sentences with short words." That's better!

So, my friends, in future I'll try to be more concise. Not that you're not the smartest blog readers in the world, because you are. But because Hubby says so.

Hugs,

P.S. If the test has trouble reading your blog, be sure to put the "www." at the front of your blog's URL in the search box.