Sarah Arrow

I have been editing and writing more blogs than I could have possibly imagined lately and that led me to a little digging

Blog readability is important and when I say readability I am not talking about the design or the layout but your actual words. I recall having a discussion with Sally Church nearly three years ago about a widgety gadgety thing that measured the reading age of your blog. What it did was scan your blog posts and determine the average age of the reader of your posts, with the goal being to get to college level reading so you could reach the widest possible audience.

Blog readability test

For those of you that know Sally and read her blogs you will know she is a pharmaceutical marketer and her blogs can contain a huge amount of long unpronounceable words, you will also know she writes in a style that enables non medical profession readers to understand the complexities of various cancer treatments and the impact of cancer drugs.

Not at any point is it ‘dumbed’ down – it’s written in a way that engages and informs as well as being written at a good level – meaning her blog gets the maximum amount of readers possible for it’s niche.

In the past I have thought writing to a specific reading age meant dumbing down your content, but as Sally demonstrates it doesn’t and whilst the reading age of her blog may be higher than mine, it’s written in intelligible language Remember if you want people to bookmark and talk about your blog and encourage people to visit it and comment, they have to understand what they read – even if it’s not their field of interest.

Is this something you could do for your blog?

Have you done the test yet? Want to share your blogs readability with us?

Sarah

PS this blog’s results are -