Readability Handbook: Readability guidelines

Getting started

Readability guidelines

At its core, readability is about clearly communicating your thoughts and ideas, so that readers can easily understand.

You achieve this through a number of easy measures, including:

  • Focus on your customer and write at the correct reading level
  • Shorten your sentences
  • Reduce the number of long words
  • Scrub your copy of buzzwords, geekspeak, jargon and acronyms
  • Don’t overuse adverbs

Its important to remember that when we talk about readability, we’re not talking about dumbing down content.

“Write for the expert, but write so the non-expert can understand.” - Bernard Kilgore, Wall Street Journal.

Throughout our blog we have a number of great tips and advice on how you can use readability as a content tool.

We add to these regularly, but some blogs to begin with are:

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