To be effective business documents need to be readable. There are many factors which impact on readability – layout, relevance, structure etc. Here Philip Moon of ProSeminar takes a look at MS Word’s 'Readability' statistics and the principles writers can apply to create sentences and paragraphs which are both fluent and easy to understand.
'Readability' is the measure of how easy a document is to read. As you may know, MS Word helpfully provides readability statistics as part of its spell- and grammar-check function. If you haven’t activated this feature (and I find that quite a lot of people haven’t) then I’d encourage you and your colleagues to do so.
One of Microsoft's key readability measures is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score. Supposedly the higher this score, the more difficult a passage is to read. And what produces a high score is a succession of long words in long sentences. However, clear and fluent writing involves not only avoiding long sentences, but also crafting paragraphs which blend sentences of different lengths. Some of these may be short (five to 12 words), some may be medium length (13-25 words) and a few may be longer - up to (say) a maximum of 40 words.
Writers therefore need to be able to edit and shorten their sentences where necessary. Sometimes this is a matter of spotting and deleting superfluous words. Sometimes it’s a matter of dropping a conjunction and creating two or more new sentences. Sometimes it’s a matter of identifying an alternative turn of phrase. However in the interest of fluency, a writer may also need to lengthen some sentences – creating compound and complex sentences to replace a succession of short sentences which would otherwise produce a 'staccato' effect.
Paragraphs should rarely be more than six sentences long but a succession of short one- or two-sentence paragraphs is also inappropriate. Where sentences are longer, paragraphs should be shorter. Above all, writers need to avoid having long words, in long sentences, in long paragraphs.
Readability is also helped by good punctuation. This is particularly the case with longer sentences. Here it’s helpful to use commas to separate main and subordinate clauses or to use brackets, dashes or other devices to indicate that something is an aside or not essential to the understanding of the sentence.
These topics - readability, sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation and editing skills - are key ingredients in ProSeminar’s Business Writing Skills Workshop. This intensive and interactive one-day workshop also covers other core issues such as relevance, structure, layout and proofreading. (ProSeminar also offers a one-day Writing Reports & Proposals Workshop.)
See also ProSeminar’s Top Tips series which includes articles such as 'Proofreading', 'What Makes a Good Report' and 'Managing Information and Making it Meaningful’.