Page 167 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

77 WATCH YOUR
READABILITY

Copywriting quality is such a subjective area that many people
flounder when asked to judge the merits of two versions of the
same piece. Or of two completely unrelated pieces of copy. In direct
marketing, print or online, you have response rates of course. But a
lot of the time, the discussion takes place before the piece is mailed
or deployed.

There are three main battlegrounds when arguing about copy
quality. The first is seniority. “I’m in charge and I say it sucks.” The
second is experience. “We did this last year and it blew the control
out of the water.” The third is readability.

The idea

From a large organization that must remain nameless
I was hired to advise this rather bureaucratic organization on how
it might improve the quality of its copywriting. In particular, they
wanted me to look at their website, which ran to several thousand
pages. (I didn’t review them all of course, just enough to get a feeling
for their style—and any problem areas that might exist.) The first
test I ran, because the text looked unforgivingly long-winded, was to
measure readability. To do that I used the Flesch Reading Ease test,
which is embedded in Microsoft Word for Windows®.

Rudolph Flesch was an Austrian-born author, writing consultant,
and readability expert. He wrote numerous books on the subject
of Plain English and developed the Flesch Reading Ease test. It’s
a formula that uses the average number of syllables per word and

158 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS