When I first started blogging, I think I tried to impress people with big words and long and dense posts, and quickly discovered that this did not go over so well. An article in Ragan’s PR Daily reminded me of the importance of communicating clearly by using plain and simple language. Here is an excerpt.
The use of unfamiliar or complex terms interferes with comprehension and slows readers down. Readers may even skip terms they don’t understand, hoping to find their meaning in the rest of the sentence.Readers are not impressed by the use of complex words; they’re frustrated by them
It goes on to list 24 highfalutin words and their simpler alternatives (so, is “highfalutin” too fancy?)
The post also reminded me of a topic I saw a few weeks ago on Dan Zarrella’s blog (this guy is pretty much a genius when it comes to the science of social media; you should subscribe to his email newsletter and read his blog if the topic is of interest). He has published a readability analyzer plugin for WordPress blogs that reports on how simple or complex your content is as you write it.
I think I will give it a whirl. In addition, there are a range of utilities available (I am pretty sure that MS Word has one) for grading your content in terms of readability. There are also online tools like this fry readability calculator, it needs a wordcount of 600 to be really effective, but it has a lot of technical stats that may be useful.
So, even if you find it hard to simplify language and like using big words, with all of these tools it is hard to justify writing dense text, unless you enjoy having a small audience for your content.
