Making Things Shorter for Easier Reading

Greetings again. Today is Independence Day in the United States. This evening there will be fireworks.

But now I’ll discuss something less dramatic than fireworks: making things shorter and therefore easier to read.

In general, long words, sentences, and paragraphs tend to be hard to read. Making them shorter can aid reading.

Here are examples of making words or phrases shorter and more readable:

• attempt → try
• fundamental → basic
• red in color → red
• at this point in time → now
• produced relief of → relieved

More examples and guidance appear in Chapter 14, “Communicating Crisply,” in Presenting Science to the Public.

The last part of this chapter shows a way to estimate the readability of a piece of writing. It entails doing a calculation based on (1) the average number of words per sentence and (2) the percentage of words that are three syllables or longer.

You can also estimate readability using Microsoft Word. To do so, go to Options and choose “Show readability statistics” or the equivalent. (The exact location differs among versions of Word.)

Then, when you check spelling, you will get readability statistics. These statistics include the Flesch-Kincaid grade level (the approximate number of years of schooling needed to understand the writing easily).

Especially if an audience will include non-native readers of English, I try to keep this grade level fairly low. (The score for the blog post that you’re now reading is about 9.) And writing readably makes a piece of writing easier for everyone to understand.