Remember those reading tests from high school? The ones where they would tell you you read at a random grade level (and didn’t explain what that meant). Bet you thought that would never come up again.

Well, bad news. If you're writing anything online, keep reading level in mind. Specifically the Flesch-Kincaid readability score.

What Is the Flesch-Kincaid Scale

When something is hard to read, what exactly does that mean? While that seems subjective, there is a mathematical formula to asses exactly how hard something is to read.

The Flesch-Kincaid readability test is used to assess the difficulty of a text. It is a measure of sentence length and word complexity, two factors that affect how easy it is for someone to understand a text. This test has been widely adopted in the United States as an indicator of how difficult it will be for someone to read a piece of text.

It's actually a combination of two tests. One is the Flesch Reading Ease, and the other is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. They have slightly different weighing factors that average out to give an approximate assessment of the difficulty of a given piece of text.

The formulas

Both tests consider the average number of syllables in words, the number and type of sentences, and the number of words with three or more syllables.

These are the actual formulas for those who want to see the numbers

Flesch Reading Ease:

206.835-1.015(total words/total sentences)-84.6(total syllables/total words)

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level:

0.39(words/sentences) + 11.8(syllables/words) - 15.59

The higher the Ease score, the easier it is to understand. A typical grade 4 student should be able to read text with an Ease score of around 60-70.

Conversely, the higher the grade level, the harder it is to read.

How the Flesch-Kincaid Score Affects SEO

Okay, great. How does that apply to content writing?

Basically, readability affects your SEO.

Now, search engines don't tally the grade level and ease (according to Google). So these particular numbers aren’t going toward increasing your page ranking.

But they can give a good idea of how accessible your content is. And if you're posting unreadable content, you're cheating yourself out of better rankings and a wider audience.

Why does that matter?

You may be thinking, why do I need my content to be readable by a sixth grader? They’re not my audience.

There are two reasons why this isn’t a good line of reasoning:

1. Accessibility. You shouldn't assume a level of literacy among your clientele base. Some people have less access to schools. Some people have disabilities that make reading more challenging, such as dyslexia. And English isn't everyone's first language.

2. No one likes reading difficult blogs.

It's pretty intuitive if you think about it. Unless you enjoy reading textbooks (which good for you, I guess), you probably choose to read clear, concise, and easy-to-understand content.

Most of the time, people only give web content a skim anyway. So if you’re giving them a block of unreadable text, they’ll give it one look and find their information elsewhere.

How and When To Use Flesch-Kincaid

I doubt you want to tally your results up by hand. Luckily there are quite a few handy dandy programs to do the math for you. Most SEO tools will include some readability score, and many free tools are available for that specific purpose. 

And Word even has the feature built-in.

Here is mine for this article as an example!

Goals and Exceptions

According to Grammarly, most text written for the general public should sit around an 8th-grade reading level and have over 60 on the reading ease.

This means a 12-13-year-old child should be able to read your writing without too much trouble.

Of course, with these guidelines are plenty of exceptions.

Firstly, if your target market is younger, shoot for a lower grade level and higher ease. This also applies if you’re targeting people with a very base level of English.

Conversely, some topics will not be easy to read, no matter what. For example, technical writing will likely not translate to the grade school level. And sometimes, more complex topics require a higher level of vocabulary.

But I will challenge you to aim for simplicity. Good writing doesn’t have to be hard to read. If you can take a five-dollar word and make change, you should.

Changing your scores

Now, what do you do if you run your content through and come back with a bad score?

1. Find your longest words and exchange them for smaller words that mean the same thing.

2. Break up your sentences. Compound sentences don't have to be. And you can usually break up complex sentences into multiple simple ones without losing much of your meaning.

3. (Bonus!) Paragraph length isn't really taken into account with either of these metrics. But you should aim for 3 sentences or less in a paragraph for online writing.

Write To Be Read

We don't write to hear ourselves talk (or we really shouldn't). We write to communicate. And making the barrier to entry as low as possible helps us communicate the most effectively to the highest number of people. The Flesch-Kincaid Scale isn't the only method, but it is an excellent place to start.

If you’re looking for writers who can break down complicated subject matter, People First Content is for you. We excel at taking all kinds of topics and making them accessible to your audience. Contact us today to get started!

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