Flesch Reading Ease – is ‘Readability’ such a good measurement?

How do you measure ‘Readability’?

Flesch Reading Ease is the standard measure of readability used in WordPress sites, which helps articles to rank higher on search engines (i.e. Google to all intents and purposes).

It measures textual difficulty of a reading passage in English – the lower the score, the more difficult the text is.

How it works

• The Flesch readability score uses the sentence length (number of words per sentence) and the number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease.
• Texts with a very high Flesch Reading Ease score (about 100) are very easy to read, have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables.
• Usually, a Reading Ease score of 60-70 is believed to be acceptable/ normal for web texts.
  

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There are pros and cons to readability formulas…..but I must confess, I am not a fan – applying mathematics to literature is never a ‘winner’ in my book.

However, in these days of social media and website ranking, it might be useful to bear in mind if your article ranks at the very extreme for readability. 

Not all texts are created equal….

Advantages of Using Readability Formulas 

1. Readability formulas can help readers to understand an article more easily, by cutting out unnecessary long, complicated words or phrases
2. A readable text can be reused across other forms of social media, especially those where brevity is encouraged

Disadvantages of Using Readability Formulas 

1. Readability is different from comprehension – if your writing is not clear, having shorter words will not help your readers to understand you
2. They are no guarantee of quality – in fact, most literary works ‘fail’ when scored upon readability formulas, which are therefore seen as an over-simplification.
3. In languages other than English, they are unreliable