How to make your writing easier to read

Readability scores are crude instruments. They count syllables and sentence lengths, and they cannot tell a beautiful sentence from an incoherent one. But they are useful for the same reason a bathroom scale is useful: not because the number is the goal, but because a sharp move in the number means something changed.

Lever one: sentence length variance

The most common readability problem is not long sentences. It is that every sentence is the same length. A page of 20-word sentences is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with vocabulary — the reader gets no rhythm and no signal about what matters.

Aim for an average around 15 to 20 words, with real variance around it. Follow a 30-word sentence with a five-word one. The short sentence lands harder because of the long one before it.

Lever two: passive voice, used deliberately

Passive voice is not a grammatical error and the blanket advice to remove it is wrong. 'The vase was broken' is the right sentence when you do not know or do not want to say who broke it. The problem is unintentional passive: it hides the actor, adds words, and makes prose feel evasive.

Keep passive constructions where the actor is genuinely unknown, irrelevant, or where the object is the real subject of the paragraph. Cut them where you are avoiding responsibility or padding a sentence.

Lever three: word choice

• Prefer the shorter word when it means the same thing: 'use' over 'utilise', 'help' over 'facilitate', 'about' over 'approximately'.
• Keep the technical term when it is precise. 'Latency' is not a fancy way of saying 'slow'; it means something specific.
• Cut nominalisations — verbs turned into nouns. 'Make an assessment of' is 'assess'. 'Provide assistance to' is 'help'.
• Delete intensifiers that do no work: very, really, extremely, actually, basically.
• Watch for abstraction stacks: 'the implementation of the optimisation of the process' has three abstract nouns and no picture.

Structure does more than syntax

Two changes usually beat any amount of sentence-level polishing. First, put the conclusion first: readers who know where a paragraph is going find every sentence in it easier. Second, one idea per paragraph — if you cannot summarise a paragraph in a phrase, it is holding two ideas that want to be separated.

What the scores actually measure

Flesch Reading Ease and its relatives combine average sentence length with average syllables per word. That is all. They are blind to jargon density, logical order, and whether the piece is true. A score of 60 to 70 suits general audiences; technical documentation reasonably sits lower.

So treat the score as a smoke alarm. If it drops sharply between drafts, something got harder to read and it is worth finding out what. If it sits in a sensible band and the read-aloud test passes, stop optimising and go and check whether the argument is any good.

A ten-minute edit pass

1. 1Read the piece aloud, marking every place you stumble. Fix those first — stumbles are the honest signal.
2. 2Find your longest three sentences and split each into two.
3. 3Search for 'was', 'were', 'been' and check each hit for accidental passive.
4. 4Delete every 'very', 'really' and 'basically'.
5. 5Check each paragraph has one idea, and move the conclusion to the front.
6. 6Re-run the analysis and confirm the average sentence length moved in the direction you intended.