I took a short business writing course a few years ago. While a lot of the material involved things I already knew, we also covered some very interesting things. One of which was the level of your writing. The level of your writing is generally measured by school grade. For example, this post is written a bit above a 6th grade level. How do I know that? MS Word has a handy little feature in it that lets you find out what level your writing is. If you go to the Tools menu and select Options, you’ll see a lot of tabs. Select the Spelling & Grammar tab. The very last check box should say Show Readability Statistics. Make sure it’s selected and then run a spell check on your work. This will give you the level of your writing.
So why would I even want to write at such a low level? I have a University education and consider myself a strong writer. It’s not that difficult for me to write at a 12th grade level (the highest the scale goes) all the time. The reason is that I’m more interested in conveying my ideas than impressing you with how complicated I can make my writing. There’s always a balance of course. Some topics require complicated words. Sometimes your natural style of writing goes well beyond the ideal levels you would like to reach. I’m not trying to suggest that everything needs to be written in a simple manner.
The point of writing at lower levels is to be inclusive and remove distractions from your ideas. When you write at a lower level, you will be opening your material up to a broader audience. More people will be able to understand what you’re trying to say. Beyond that, the people who can read at much higher levels will have a much easier time understanding you since they won’t have to pause to understand a long sentence with many complicated words.
There are lots of advantages to writing at a lower level than your audience can read. The added clarity can do wonders for your readers. Try it and see how it works for you.
writing
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
7 responses so far ↓
1 mike // Jul 3, 2007 at 11:32 am
That is certainly one approach, and it works for Readers Digest and US Weekly.
The other approach, which I favour, says that you never get smarter if you only read things written below your level. If people don’t understand a few words in a post, or if they find a certain grammatical construction to be strange, they can suck it up and learn something. This approach has worked well for things like the West Wing or for Penny Arcade, which use language as a tool to do reasonably sophisticated things.
There’s also the whole “Let Shakespeare write Shakespeare and let Wordsworth write Wordsworth”. Authors have their own styles, their own way of writing, their own approach to communicating ideas. Intentionally altering that style to be less intelligent often results in writing that sounds stilted, or inconsistent, or weak and maudlin.
Not every approach is right for every written work, but I have to tell you that the places that keep me coming back are, in general, a sophisticated read. Writing below the level of your current audience might… change your audience.
Certainly there are advantages to dumbing down your words so your audience blindly accepts what you say without having to think about it, but there are some notable disadvantages, too.
In other news, I just used Penny Arcade and the West Wing as examples for the same point.
2 Marc // Jul 3, 2007 at 5:41 pm
While I hear what you’re saying, the ideas can be challenging in and of themselves without needing to load up on the language. When you’re trying to convey those ideas, the simpler language helps. Take “A Brief History Of Time” as a fine example.
That being said, I will concede your Penny Arcade West Wing analogy. As always, different strokes for different folks.
3 Ian // Jul 4, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Mike: “Okay.”
Marc: I’m still not convinced it works like that. Take it to the logical conclusion: If you get more people by writing at a 6th grade level, why not get ALL people by writing at a 1st grade level? I tend to agree with Mike though — I guess the proper approach is write at an appropriate level of sophistication for your content and your audience, don’t write like an english lit. major.
4 Marc // Jul 4, 2007 at 2:41 pm
That’s fair and perhaps I took the wrong approach in this post. I do point out that I’m not suggesting that everything needs to be written in a simple manner. What I was thinking when the idea came to mind was that taking your writing down a notch or two can have some serious benefits sometimes. That’s not what I conveyed in the post though. Lesson learned
5 Emily // Jul 4, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I think the key to the whole debate here is in your title where it specifies we’re talking about the audience here. If this blog were written to English lit majors, you would vary your sentence structure more, use more complex sentences, (and check and double check those commas!) But a blog, written to the masses, should probably be written at a lower grade level to ensure comprehension. Do you ever want your blog to be a chore to read? Do you want people to come back? Or do you want to impress them with your high English skills and convince them you are well above their level? It all comes back to audience and the ideas you want to convey.
6 Somu // Jul 4, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Thanks for the tip. I didn’t know that there is a tool to evaluate one’s writing. There’s so many hidden treasures in MS Office.
7 Marc // Jul 5, 2007 at 9:33 am
Some great discussion going on, good stuff
Emily: That’s exactly what the motivation behind this article was
Somu: I’m happy I was able to help. There are always so many features in Office programs that you never find out about until years after you’ve been using them.