Like many high school teachers, mine loved big words, with “lugubrious” being one of his favorites. He enjoyed complex sentences and had no qualms about long paragraphs.
All of that is fine for English class, but it doesn’t work for marketing content.
Instead, with any content you produce these days, your goal should be to make it as readable as possible. This means forgetting what your English teachers told you and going back to some basics.
Before getting into tips on doing that, though, consider why this matters.
Why does readability matter?
Think about the last time you read classic literature or an essay written in high school English style. Or if you haven’t for a while, see if you can find an excerpt to read.
Then consider these questions:
- Do you find that type of reading easy?
- Do you have to focus more to follow long sentences to the end?
- Do you have to read complicated paragraphs a couple of times to grasp what they’re saying?
- How long does it take you to read?
For most people, that type of writing is harder to get through, requiring more time and concentrated effort.
And let’s face it. With so many options out there, given the choice, your customers will prefer content they can easily read and grasp over content that makes them work hard. If they have to go somewhere else for that, they probably will.
Plus, SEO tools are now looking at readability, which is another reason to pay attention to this.
With that in mind, here are three tips to help make your content readable.
Tip 1: Use simple language where possible
The first step is to choose simpler words when you can.
In some cases, depending on your product or service, this may not be possible. For example, technical, science, or medical fields often require the use of more complex words.
Even so, you can make the surrounding language simpler. You can say “many” instead of “a plethora” or “confusing” instead of “convoluted.”
It’s also important to remember that you’re not doing this because you think your customers can’t understand more complex language. They likely can, but they would rather spend the time and effort on other things rather than figuring out what you’re trying to say.
Tip 2: Aim for shorter sentences and paragraphs
It’s not just the language that needs to be simple. It’s how you write your sentences and paragraphs.
While you might have some paper brochures to hand out, most content these days is online, with many of your customers reading on a mobile device. This means you should think about what fits on a phone or tablet screen.
People don’t want to scroll multiple times to finish a sentence or paragraph. Keep them short.
Tip 3: Break it up
Another way to improve readability is to break your content into sections, bullets, or lists. This also works well for smaller screens, but there’s another reason.
Most people these days tend to skim rather than read word for word. While it’s never fun to think about people glancing over what you wrote, it’s the reality.
By breaking up your content in different ways, you can at least catch their attention a little more and focus on the key points.
Keep your customers engaged with readable content
While it’s not always easy to let go of those English class lessons, it’s important. Making your content readable will engage your customers and help with your SEO ranking.
Just remember to keep it as short and simple as you can, and even if some customers skim what you wrote, they’ll still appreciate the readability.
It’s a good thing I don’t have customers to please, as I like the words ‘plethora’ and ‘convoluted.’ 🙂 But for what you’re talking about, I take your point. I also like longer sentences broken up with semi-colons. I tend to use a lot of them.
I like those words, too, but I try to avoid them in certain kinds of writing.