How Readable Are You?

Reading text on a screen is a lot harder than reading the same text on paper. Most Web surfers scan text rather than reading word by word. So you need to keep your text as clear, concise, and readable as possible.

You can get the readability score of any website from Readability.info. In fact, you get several scores based on different tools. And you can find out what the scores mean as well. Most define readability in terms of a grade level.

"Writing for the Web" scores fairly well, with grade levels ranging from grade 6 to 11.5. The Flesch Index is 68.5, where 100 is dead easy.

I was also happy to see that my average sentence length is 16.1 words. Twenty would be pushing it. Almost half the sentences here are no more than 11 words, and only 17% are over 26 words. My paragraphs average 4.5 sentences.

A shocking 25% of my sentences, however, use the passive voice. I'll have to work on increasing my active-voice sentences.

Readability.info could itself use some revision. The text sprawls clear across the screen, making it hard to read, and it could benefit from careful proofreading. But the scoring is very fast and very informative.

Comments

[Derek]

Actually, Crawford, both you and I linked to readability.info earlier this year, though it's a link worth repeating:

http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/ckbetas/2004/03/web_text_readab.html

http://www.penmachine.com/2004/03/how-easy-are-these-words-to-read.html

[Haemi]

I am always interested to see stats about my blog and writing, and this was certainly interesting!

I had 32% passive sentences, so I better work on making more active sentences (not that it is always better, of course). Also, I was all over the place in the readability grades, ranging from "below school year 5" on the Lix one, and 82.4 in the Flesch index. I'm not sure about the scores, but the data produced was informative.

[Des Walsh]

An interesting point I heard the other day from someone professing to be an expert on publishing online was that Verdana is the best font for online readability and was designed (for Microsoft) specifically for this purpose.

[Derek Andrews]

I think one has to be a little careful when submitting web pages for analysis. I can only assume that every single line of text will be read, including all the headings and navigation links which are bound to skew the results to show an abnormal number of short sentences and seemingly bad grammar.