Since both equations use sentence length as a major factor in this calculation, shorten your sentence length to make your text easier to read. Now that we know what these scores mean, the next question is, how do you modify your writing to increase or decrease your scores to make it easier to read? How do you Impact Your Flesch-Kincaid Scores Copy written for that received a rating of 8 can be read by 80% of Americans. While this assessment still uses sentence length and word length to calculate the final score, the final number you receive is the grade reading level of your text. Case in point, the Harvard Law Review scores in the low 30’s. Keep in mind, you will want to aim for a lower score if you are writing a book or blog post that is geared towards a more academic audience. To give you a point of reference, Reader’s Digest comes in with a score of around 65. Keep in mind, longer sentences and longer words produce a lower score. This is an acceptable score for information written for the general population. A score of 70-60 is considered 8th-9th grade reading level. The lower the score, the more challenging the text is to read. The Flesch Reading Ease scores are on a scale of 0-100. There are two different formulas that are used, resulting in two different scores, the Flesch Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. Some states have laws on the books that various insurance documents need to have a certain Flesch-Kincaid readability score. Flesch studied all types of writing and came up with a formula that takes into account the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word. It was addressed when many legal documents appeared to be written in a way that was difficult to read and understand. These formulas were originally designed to help the military evaluate the readability of their manuals. A Brief History of Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests

And if people have a hard time understanding your book or blog post, they won’t finish it and they for sure won’t tell anyone else about it. I know we all want to sound smart in our writing, but if people can’t comprehend what you are trying to say, it defeats the purpose. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests offer two common tests you can use to assess the level of the readability of our work. Things like the words they use, the references they make, and of course the complexity of the writing. However, I continue to remind my authors to keep their audience in mind when writing.

That is what a second and third draft are all about. For the first draft, don’t worry about the grammar, sentence structure, or readability. In starting your blog or your book, I always tell people to just write.

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