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How readable is your law blog?

November 25, 2004

Writing for the Web is different than writing offline copy. As Crawford Killian, publisher of Writing for the Web, says: “Reading text on a screen is a lot harder than reading the same text on paper. Most Web surfers scan text rather than reading word by word. So you need to keep your text as clear, concise, and readable as possible.”

You can get the readability score of any website from Readability.info. There are several scores based on different tools and find out what the scores mean. You can also see the readability scores of the more popular Web sites, such as the New York Times.

By running my blog through the test, I found there’s a few things I need to work on. My FOG grade level is 11 where writing for grade 7 is optimal. My Flesh ‘reading easy formula’ is 49.5 where 100 is ideal.

My average sentence length is 32.1 words. Twenty to thirty is preferable. My paragraphs average is 4.5 sentences, where 2 to 3 is best.

I really need to work on verb types. Passive verbs ( ‘to be’ ) should be used sparingly. My sentences use the passive context 38% of the time.

Thanks Crawford for telling me about Readability.info in yourpost this week. We need more people like you helping us write for the Web.

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