How to Write So People Actually Read It

Most unclear writing isn’t unclear because the ideas are hard. It’s unclear because the sentences are too long, and the writer never noticed.

That’s a fixable problem, and it’s measurable.

The one number worth knowing

Flesch Reading Ease scores text from 0 to 100 using exactly two inputs:

206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words)

Long sentences push it down. Long words push it down harder. That’s the whole model.

Score	Level	Typical of
80–90	Easy	Conversational writing
70–80	Fairly easy	Popular fiction, good plain English
60–70	Standard	Newspapers, most web writing
50–60	Fairly difficult	Quality journalism
30–50	Difficult	Academic and technical writing
Below 30	Very difficult	Legal contracts

Aim for 60–70 for anything with a general audience. That’s roughly an eighth-grade reading level, which sounds low and isn’t, it’s the level at which people read comfortably rather than effortfully. Including people who are tired, on a phone, half-distracted, or reading in their second language. Which is most people, most of the time.

A low score isn’t automatically bad

A research paper or a contract should score low. Precision costs readability, and in those contexts precision wins. Readers of a journal article expect dense prose and can handle it.

The score is a problem when it’s lower than your audience expects. A privacy policy scoring 25 has failed at its only job. A landing page scoring 40 is losing people who had somewhere else to be.

The five fixes, in order of impact

1. Split long sentences

This is the big one, and nothing else comes close.

Any sentence over about 25 words is usually two sentences that haven’t been separated yet. Look for “and”, “but”, “which” and semicolons. Those are the joins.

Before: Although the initial results were promising, the team decided that further testing would be required before any conclusions could be drawn, particularly given the small sample size and the fact that the study had not been replicated. (38 words)

After: The initial results were promising. But the team wanted more testing before drawing conclusions. The sample was small, and nobody had replicated the study. (24 words, two sentences)

Same content. Considerably easier.

2. Use shorter words where they mean the same thing

Not because long words are wrong. Because the short one is usually clearer and costs nothing.

Instead of	Write
utilise	use
facilitate	help
approximately	about
commence	start
purchase	buy
demonstrate	show
sufficient	enough
in the event that	if
prior to	before
in order to	to

3. Cut throat-clearing

Phrases that occupy space while the writer works out what to say:

• “It is important to note that…”, six words, no information
• “It should be pointed out that…”
• “The fact that…”
• “There are several reasons why…”

Delete them. The sentence underneath is almost always fine on its own.

4. Prefer verbs to noun phrases

English lets you turn any verb into a noun and then need another verb to carry it. Undo that:

• “We made a decision” → we decided
• “Give consideration to” → consider
• “Conduct an investigation into” → investigate
• “Provide assistance to” → help

Shorter and more direct at the same time.

5. Use the active voice by default

“The committee approved the plan” beats “the plan was approved by the committee”. Shorter, clearer, and you can see who did what.

The passive has real uses. When the actor is genuinely unknown, or irrelevant, or when you’re deliberately keeping the focus on the object. It becomes a problem when it’s a habit rather than a choice, which in institutional writing it usually is.

What the score can’t see

This matters, because a readability score is easy to trust too much.

Short and meaningless scores brilliantly. “The thing did the thing to the thing” is extremely readable and says nothing.

Jargon made of short words is invisible to it. “We need to align on the ask before we socialise the deck” scores beautifully and means nothing to anyone outside the building.

It ignores structure entirely. Headings, paragraph breaks, lists, and the order you present ideas in affect comprehension enormously. None of it appears in the formula.

It ignores whether you’re right. Obviously. Worth saying anyway.

Use it as a smoke alarm, not a grade. A bad score reliably means something is wrong. A good score means nothing is obviously wrong with your sentence lengths. Which is not the same as being clear.

The fastest way to improve a document

Don’t try to shave a syllable off every word. Find the five longest sentences and split them.

That’s it. In almost every document, the difficulty is concentrated in a handful of sprawling sentences, and fixing those moves the score more than an hour of general tinkering. The readability checker lists them for exactly this reason.

And the oldest test still works

Read it aloud.

Where you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. Where you stumble, the phrasing is wrong. Where you get bored, so will everyone else.

No formula catches as much as that does.