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In the world of digital communication, readability is what keeps your audience hooked to your content. No matter how good and valuable your content is, if it’s not readable, your audiences might leave it midway and move on to something else. So, in order to improve user experience, SEO rankings and retention rate of audience in general – here is a detailed guide on how you can increase the readability of any content.

Use Simple Terms

We vet everything you write through the Plain English Campaign website here before accepting it for your site, so we know all the alternatives to those long-winded phrases that legal and financial services love!

Use Bullet Points

You’ll notice we use bullet points quite a bit on The Money Principle website and in our personal finance articles for clients too – they’re a quick way to outline the information being presented and make it easy to scan read.

Use Headings

This is kind of obvious when you write long list articles of over 10k words like we do each month for one client, but there’s no good reason why you can’t provide some structure in standard 500-800 word blog posts too?

Bullet points and numbered lists

Bullet points and numbered lists help improve the readability of your text. They allow you to present information in a clear and concise format, making it easier for readers to understand and remember it. Lists are very effective when you want to summarize the most important elements or steps, or when presenting key features of something. In addition, they help to diversify your content visually – it’s always better than writing long paragraphs. However, try to keep the bullets short.

Optimize Font and Formatting

The visual design of your content impacts how easy it is to read. Choose a clean, easy-to-read font such as Arial, Helvetica or Georgia and make sure the font size is big enough to be easily read – which is generally considered to be between 12-16 points. Also pay attention to line spacing, margins and alignment. Sufficient white space around text makes for an easier reading experience as it reduces eye strain and makes the content feel more inviting.

Use Transition Words and Phrases

Transition words and phrases help guide your reader along as your writing flows from one idea to the next. As a result, you’ll want to use them—perhaps generously—to cue readers in on relationships between your thoughts that you deem important enough to emphasize or reinforce. For example, after the aforementioned nuclear explosion sentence, I may include: However, unlike volcanoes, nuclear explosions can create EMPs…”

Proofread and Edit Thoroughly

No matter how well-crafted your content is, if it’s full of errors it will be hard to read. Always proofread and edit your content for spelling, grammar, punctuation mistakes. Look out for awkward phrasing, redundancy or places where better clarity can be achieved by rewriting some parts. Reading your content aloud can help you catch errors and also see if something doesn’t sound right.

Check your readability score

There are several online tools like the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, that will help you measure the readability of your content. These tools read your writing and assign a readability score indicating how easy or difficult it is to comprehend. You should be going for a score level equivalent to the type of readers you want to target by them reading. For most general publics, 60-70 Flesch Kincaid is recommended as then its readable for most people.

CONCLUSION

If you want to get your message across and connect with your audience, you have to make sure that the content is easy to read. To do this, you can write short sentences and paragraphs, use simple words, create headings and lists, include visuals as well as consider font and formatting. In addition, don’t forget to proofread your text or test your readability score. This will help you provide a better total user experience with your content!