🍴Calm or Chaos?

If you’ve ever been to a water park, you know the lazy river is supposed to be tranquil.

More times than not, it’s pure chaos.

Kids are going nuts and there are so many rafts you feel claustrophobic.

What you want is that calm, lazy river.

It's you and your raft.

There's some sun and shade.

And you glide along as the gentle rush of water carries you from start to finish.

If you had to choose between the crazy and calm, which would you go with?

I’d guess the calm one.

These lazy rivers symbolize readability scores.

The chaotic lazy river = bad readability score

The calm lazy river = good readability score

What is a readability score?

A readability score tells you how easy or difficult your content is to read.

It's important to focus on your readability score because it helps you simplify your thoughts and ideas, making them easy to understand.

According to the Hemingway App, the goal is a 9th-grade reading level as it’s the adult average.

SIDE NOTE: This email's readability is at a 4th-grade level.

Does that mean it's childish or pithy? Nope.

It means I stayed focused and didn't add any unnecessary complexities.

3 ways to improve your readability

A good readability score makes your content more accessible.

To improve your readability scores, focus on:

• Sentence length - Focus on writing shorter sentences. 

• Complex words - Words with more syllables are more challenging to read. Keep things simple. 

• Paragraph structure - Avoid big chunks of text. Break big paragraphs down into shorter ones. 

Readability Checkers

How do you check your readability score?

Here are a few tools I’ve used in the past:

• Hemingway App (Free. Option to upgrade.)

• Grammarly (Free but paid is better)

• Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant (Paid. This was my go-to for a while, and I loved it.)

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