The thrifty writer’s guide to more readable writing

The email in my inbox touted reviews of four editing programs. With spelling and grammar checks already available in my software, what I wanted was a program that will tell me how to, i.e., force me to, write better. And then my eyes went straight to one with that promise. OK, it was Hemingway, which promised to locate all those too-long sentences, pesky passive constructions, and convoluted wordings guaranteed to trip readers.

Oh, and it was free, the reviewer said! Apparently, what he meant, I realized after several minutes of Googling, is that there’s a free trial offer. But I wanted something not only magically delicious but also completely free. And I realized I already had what I longed for—in the readability statistics on my version of Word. Free, that is, because it’s included in software I’ve already paid for.

A writing friend introduced me to these statistics years ago, under the terms Flesch Reading Ease Test and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test. After that introduction, I spent many obsessive lunch breaks running every scrap of writing I could find through these tests, which analyze sentence structure, sentence length, word and paragraph length, and that dreaded issue of passive construction. 

image: wikimedia commons

Rudolf Flesch first developed his reading level test to determine how hard (or easy) written English documents are to understand. Later, he and J. Peter Kincaid developed the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test for the U.S. military’s technical manuals.

At approximately the same time, as a journalist I was being told to keep my writing at a sixth-grade reading level to avoid straining the attention spans, not to mention educational levels of readers. (The Wikipedia article, “Flesch-Kincaid readability tests,” rates sixth-grade level writing as “conversational English for consumers.”)

However, nobody ever told me how to write at a particular grade level. I must have managed, since I keep moving up all the way to editorship at the city desk, but I longed for tools to quantify the process.

With the Flesch tests, I had those tools.

I copied my own writing, emails from co-workers and bosses, even legal decisions into the program and chortled inwardly upon finding a federal judge’s ruling reach a level good ol’ Flesch rated as only likely to be understood by post-doctoral graduates. (By the way, multisyllable words affect the scores more than sentence length. Short, punchy words are Flesch and Kincaid’s darlings.)

My writing was at the desired sixth-grade readership. Its level actually decreased since I first discovered Flesch-Kincaid. I can now write about murder and mayhem with words and sentences comprehensible by a third-grader, and usually with zero percentage passive sentences. (This post, however, clocked in at a ninth-grade level, considerably above my usual. Blame it on those multisyllabic repetitions of Flesch-Kincaid.)  

Then I changed computers a few times, and Flesch and Kincaid disappeared somewhere in the depths of my software programs. 

However, determination not to pay for what I already had led me to unearth it from the depths of my Microsoft Office Word software. The process wasn’t quite what I remembered. Depending on your own version of Word or similar programs available for Macs, you may need to tweak my instructions. But here are the basic steps:  

·       Highlight the passage you want to edit

·       Click on “file”, then “options”, then “proofing”

·       Check to be sure you’ve enabled “grammar and spelling” and “show readability statistics”

·       Hit OK

Once you’ve toggled back to your writing sample, you may need to click on the “home” tab to bring up the results. After I did this several times, Word got grumpy and required me to click on “search” to locate the program in my history. But once all the spelling and grammar checks are run, a box will appear with the Flesch-Kincaid results.

These tell us, among other things, our average sentence length and what percentage of our sentences are in passive voice.

(A secret: if passive sentences comprise less than 1 percent of the sample, Flesch-Kincaid gives you a break and marks the total as zero. So, if every 150-200 sentences you feel compelled to throw in one in passive voice, feel free. Just don’t tell anybody I said so.)

Unlike Hemingway’s software, Flesch-Kincaid doesn’t highlight these areas in your writing sample. If you see a problem, it’s best to work with small batches at a time until you feel comfortable with sentence length and non-passive writing.  

Of course, neither Flesch-Kincaid nor Hemingway or any other program can make our writing fascinating. Or create unforgettable characters. Or thrilling plots. Only we can do that.

If you’re afraid using short words, maybe even sentences short enough for a grade-schooler to read means your writing will be boring, consider this. “Life” and “death,” “love” and “hate,” “war” and “peace,” “he” and “she,” “we” and “they” are all short words. But the concepts they stand for have kept human beings intrigued for millennia. 

And although I’ve sometimes heard writers dismiss a book as “readable,” no agent, editor or publisher ever has refused a manuscript because its writing was too clear and easy to read. Readers have enough reasons to throw books down without being kicked in the teeth by unreadable prose.

(And a final tip of the hat to the [Electric Speed] newsletter of Jane Friedman for bringing the software topic to my attention!)