Why High-Quality Writing Requires High Readability
Originally published December 2021; Updated 28 May 2026
In some sense, we should all try to be more like Ernest Hemingway. You don’t need to write about epic fishing tales, nor live in Key West with six-toed cats. But Hemingway’s written work has a particular characteristic we should all strive for in our writing. Jane Austen’s and Cormac McCarthy’s novels also share the attribute.
All three of these world-renowned novelists wrote at an elementary grade level.
The Old Man and the Sea, which won Hemingway a Pulitzer and was specifically cited in his Nobel Prize in Literature, is written at a fourth-grade level. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Reading level, while expressed as the grade level someone must have achieved to understand text, is really nothing more than a measure of the clarity of that text.
If you reframe readability as clarity, it will help you understand its importance. When looked at this way, the excuse of “but our readers are sophisticated” doesn’t apply. Your readers are sophisticated, so they don’t appreciate clear writing? Everyone appreciates clear writing. Nuclear physicists? Neil deGrasse Tyson? It doesn’t make a difference how smart someone is—they still don’t want to have to work through overly-complicated text.
What Is Readability?
There are several different established metrics for determining the reading level of text. Flesch Kincaid, Gunning Fog, Coleman Liau, the Automated Readability Index, and SMOG (which stands for, I kid you not, Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) are the most common.
While they differ slightly in detail, they all look at attributes such as sentence length and syllables per word to assign a grade-level score. A Flesch Kincaid score of 4.5 means someone who has made it halfway through fourth grade should be able to understand your text.
Another common measurement is the Flesch Reading Ease score. It also looks at sentence length and syllables, but provides a score of up to 100. A higher number indicates the text is easier to read.
Some sources describe the reading ease score as being from 0 to 100, but that’s not technically true. Particularly awful writing can earn a negative reading-ease score. Have I seen it? Unfortunately. Does it have to be atrociously bad? Yes. Is it often copy from B2B startups? Also, yes.
So, I Should Dumb Down My Writing?
In my years of writing scientific content for the general public and of assessing sales collateral, I’ve heard similar complaints about readability— “I don’t want to dumb down my writing.” Improving your readability isn’t about dumbing anything down. It’s about making the information you present easier to digest.
Einstein almost certainly never said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” Normally, I wouldn’t include a quote with such questionable attribution, but the sentiment of this one is too good to pass up. Whoever said it, it’s an accurate statement, especially where readability is concerned.
Content creators sometimes wonder why they should write at an elementary or middle school level when they know their readers have advanced degrees. Improving readability doesn’t mean making your content appropriate for school-aged children.
It means making your writing clearer and easier to read.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy wrote at a fifth-grade level. This in no way means his writing is appropriate for 10-year-olds—he wrote the novel No Country for Old Men, on which the 2007 Coen brothers film is based, and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work knows it’s not a comedy.
Murder is usually the most palatable thing that happens in McCarthy’s novels. He’s not writing for a young audience. He’s writing for anyone who doesn’t want to labor through reading (which is everyone).
Why Is Readability Important?
When we teach sales professionals how to write cold-outreach emails, we tell them to write a call to action that’s as clear and easy to understand as possible. Any friction, whether it’s too many meeting times to choose from or having to click a calendar link, makes it less likely a meeting will happen.
The same holds true for your writing. Can your prospect read the information on your website if it’s written at a grade level of 15? Of course they can—but they won’t. If someone has to work to get through your writing, that’s friction that makes them less likely to act.
The Nielsen Norman Group conducted a study with low-literacy readers and high-literacy readers. The study is now over twenty years old, but the findings are as valid now as when they were first published.
Study participants in both groups viewed a website before and after it had been redesigned for low-literacy users. They were asked to complete a selection of tasks on the site while being timed, and then asked how satisfied they were with their experience.
Not surprisingly, low-literacy readers accomplished tasks more quickly and reported higher satisfaction with the site designed at a lower reading level. What was surprising was that higher-literacy individuals had the same experience.
The higher-literacy group’s task completion rate increased from 68% to 93%, tasks took 5.1 minutes to complete, down from 14.3, and their satisfaction rating increased from 3.7 to 4.8 out of 5. Even high-literacy individuals prefer content—and get more satisfaction out of it—when it’s simpler and clearer.
It Only Takes Four Letters To Spell SERP
Another reason you should improve the readability of your online content is that it affects your search engine rankings. Many factors go into search engine rankings, and readability is a big one.
Suppose you’re a one-in-a-million company whose prospects prefer the challenge of reading confusing copy about a product they don’t even know they need. But how are these puzzle masters going to find your company if you don’t show up in the search engine results page?
At the beginning of this blog, I suggested rethinking readability not as a measure of grade level but rather as a measure of clarity. Another way to think about it is as a user experience design problem. Even sophisticated geniuses don’t want products that are difficult to use. You could argue that simplicity is even more important to people who already have a lot going on above the neck.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wears the same thing every day so that he doesn’t have to waste time making an extra decision. Surely he appreciates a simplified user experience.
Stop thinking about readability as lowering the grade level of your writing. Think about it as Zuckerberging your content—making it easier to understand, faster, for busy billionaires. It’s a reframe that can help you accept that, yes, even your very special, one-of-a-kind prospects will appreciate easier reading.
Tips for Improving Readability
- Break up your copy using bulleted lists. See what I did there?
- Shorten your sentences. Break long sentences into two.
- Stop using long words when short words work just as well. There is never a reason to write “utilize” when “use” is enough.
- Stop using jargon. It makes your writing harder to read, and worse, makes your reader feel like an idiot.
- Break up your copy into shorter paragraphs.
- Use subheadings.
- Test your writing! There are loads of readability sites out there. I like this one. It’s simple, provides scores for all five well-known tests, and provides a readability score.
- Say it first, then write it. This concept is also known as “write like you talk, not as you speak.” If your content doesn’t sound like natural speech, you can probably make it simpler.
You are special, and your prospects are special. They are smart, sophisticated, probably even worldly. And I promise you, they, too, appreciate clearer writing.
My Flesch Kincaid score for this blog is 8.2. It would probably have been a little lower without “Zuckerberging.” Shoot, now it’s in here twice.
I guess we can’t all be Ernest Hemingway, but we can try.
Do you need a hand making your sales collateral easier to understand? Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co to learn more about our messaging audits.