The readability of your articles and blog posts will impact whether your readers connect to your content. For instance, consider a technical article in a scientific trade magazine. Someone outside the industry would probably not enjoy sifting through the scientific jargon. If they can’t easily understand it, they’ll just click somewhere else. On the other hand, an article with an 8th grade reading level would be out of place in a scientific journal where the majority of readers have advanced degrees. However, that same article might be great for a magazine like Discover, which has a more general audience.
If your content’s readability doesn’t match your audience, your readership will drop. You’ll just be left scratching your head, wondering what went wrong. So how can you avoid this problem? Enter the WriterAccess Language Grader Tool. This new feature will become your favorite teacher, instructing you on how to deliver content that is just right.
How to Use the WriterAccess Language Grader Tool
The WriterAccess Language Grader Tool can be found on the client dashboard under My Tools/Research/Language Grader. To use it, simply copy-paste your content into the text box. Your sample text must be 200 words or longer.
Click on the “Analyze Now” button, and you’ll instantly get a grade for three scores: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and the Gunning Fog Index.
What is the Flesch Reading Ease Score?
This score tells you how hard it will be for the general public to read your article. Ranging between 1-100, the lower the score, the more difficult it is to read. Below, you’ll see a snippet from a recent National Geographic article. With a middle-of-the-road score, this content perfectly targets a general audience.
What is the Flesch-Kincaid Score?
Flesch-Kincaid scores readability by grade level. If you get a score of 9.7, your content should be accessible to the average high school freshman. This explanation of why water boils (see below) ranks at a 7th grade reading level. Perfect, since this content is from a website geared toward middle-school students.
What is the Gunning Fog Index?
This score estimates the level of education a reader would need to understand your content after the first reading. A score of 12 indicates that a reader would need a four-year high school education. For the abstract below, the average reader would need a junior college-level education to easily grasp the material. This work appeared in the American Journal of Medicine whose readership is primarily doctors.
With the Language Grader Tool to teach you, you can easily perfect your content’s readability. Keep in mind that these scores are a guide, not a rigid set of rules. An average reader doesn’t represent every single reader who comes to your site. As long as your scores are fairly close to the range for your target audience, your readers should be satisfied.
