Readability

World technology literacy skills: bad and getting worse

16% of adults are technologically illiterate

Just 8% of adults around the world can manage conflicting requests to reserve a meeting room using a reservation system, then email people to let them know whether they got the room they requested.… Read the full article

Write leads for your press release target audience

Move from event to impact

Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.

Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper.… Read the full article

Are press releases dead? No!

Long live the news release

Twitter has never issued a news release. Amazon introduced the Kindle through a series of tweets. Google announced Alphabet via a blog post from Larry Page.… Read the full article

What closet tidying taught me about editing

Audition your words to go in, not out

When Lynn Wylie, aka Best Sister Ever, sent me an Unfancy blog post arguing that all you need to look great every day is a capsule wardrobe of 37 items per season, I scoffed.… Read the full article

Why worry about your readability level?

Save money, make money and more with readable messages

What are the benefits of making your message measurably easier to read and understand?

Readability formulas measure how easy your message is to read based on average number of words per sentence, percentage of polysyllabic words and familiarity of words on the Dale Chall list.… Read the full article

Benchmark readability against the BBC

How does your news measure up?

The BBC covers the most serious news known to man — West Bank stabbings, friendly fire air strikes, Justin Bieber’s bad behavior — and does so in an average of 4.7-character words.… Read the full article

How do you define readability?

Measure, monitor and manage your message’s reading ease

How do you define readability? Readability measures how easy your message is to read. That measurement is based on factors like sentence and word length.… Read the full article

Scannable content makes message 34% more memorable

Also increases understanding, satisfaction

The more words on a web page, the longer visitors will stay.

But is that really the best metric to measure? What if you could engage users on a page for half the time, yet have them remember one-third more of the content?… Read the full article

Why high readability helps everyone

(Yes, even your audience!)

I recently attended a conference where the Nielsen Norman Group unveiled its latest eyetracking research. After more than 20 years in the lab, watching people read and respond to text, they reported this finding:

“This is too easy to read.”

… Read the full article

Stop wasting web visitors’ time with puffery

Web visitors ‘get visibly angry’ at verbose sites

Here’s an interesting dichotomy: Killing time is the killer app for mobile devices. But mobile users are in a hurry and “get visibly angry” at verbose sites that waste their time.… Read the full article