Five Rules for Readability

Five Rules for Readability

Tom Sant, author of Persuasive Business Proposals, shared five rules for making anything you write more readable. Microsoft Word can automatically tell you if you’ve met four of the rules: short sentences (average 17 words or less); short words (average five characters or less); 10th grade reading level or lower; and less than 10% passive voice. I’ve been writing for years and never knew about the “Readability Statistics” tool in Word. The fifth rule is no fluff, guff, geek or weasel words in your writing.

Press F1 while in Word to pull up the Help/Search menu. Search for Readability Statistics. Follow the instructions to turn on the feature. If using Word 2007, the “Word Options” choice is at the bottom of the right hand column of the main Word pull down menu. Once the feature is activated, you have to manually check the Spelling and Grammar of your document once. At the end of the process the summary pops up. Cool feature – I’m at a 7.0 grade reading level, 4.5 characters per word, 16.3 words per sentence and 8% for passive voice for this insight. I was higher on all these statistics and made adjustments.

Related Posts


June 11, 2022

The Importance of High-Quality Content for Your Digital Content Strategy

You’ve been developing content for your brand since day one; you’ve always heard that content is king when it comes to marketing, and have always made sure that your website and social media platforms are well-stocked. However, did you know that the quality of that content is also critical to your digital content strategy? Developing

May 15, 2022

4 Tips & Tricks for Using the Google URL Builder

Marketing campaigns – whether they be through social media, website advertisements, or emails – are a critical tool in your business’s marketing tool belt. However, it would almost be a waste of resources to set up a campaign without good tracking analytics. This is where UTM codes come into play; these are tiny snippets of

Did you know we create some really
great original content?

Jump on board if you'd like us to share it with you. We only send monthly.

Your email will never be shared with a third party.