Thursday 30 July 2009

Consider the reading age

Nobody wants hard to read web copy, so why does it still exist? And how can we improve it?

The SSAT is an august and established organisation in the education sector. I think this means we often produce complicated and over-formal writing.

Our brand guidelines state that we should be open, approachable and friendly. Formal, hard-to-read web content does not enhance this image, so I spend a lot of time rewriting copy for the web.

I learnt a technique to help with this on a training course. It's based around the reading age you aim at. Web copy should aim lower than printed text; even adults aren't comfortable with complicated text when they're online. We read a screen differently to a book and spend less time working out tricky words or sentence structures. Typical users are in a hurry and scan for easy-to-read chunks of text.

The best way to deal with this is always to bear in mind the basic principle: fewer syllables plus more sentences.

Take a sample of 100 words and count the sentences. Then count the syllables. The fewer syllables and the more sentences the better. After a while you don't even need to count - your mind automatically looks for ways to replace long words with short ones, and to break up sentences.

Give it a go - choose some web copy and start counting, then work out how you can improve it. Do it now before you forget, and it will soon become automatic!

No comments:

Post a Comment