Page 168 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

the average words per sentence to calculate a percentage score. The
higher the better.

To test my client’s web copy, I cut and pasted a couple of hundred
words from their home page into Word, then ran the test. Before
I give you their score, let me share just three benchmarks from
Rudolph Flesch’s own article on writing Plain English. Consumer
ads—82 percent. Reader’s Digest—65 percent. Harvard Law
Review—32 percent. Now for my client. Zero. Or, in other words,
their online marketing copy was slightly easier to read than the
American Internal Revenue Code but slightly harder to read than a
standard car insurance policy.

The problem was twofold: lots of long words and lots of long
sentences. Don’t get me wrong: this wasn’t incorrect writing in
the sense of grammatical errors. Nor was it inelegant. It was just
fiendishly difficult to understand. We began remedial work at once,
chopping long sentences up into more manageable chunks (usually
by finding semicolons and replacing them with full stops) and
replacing long words with shorter equivalents.

In practice

• Get into the habit of checking the readability of your copy. It

takes moments to do it and, to be honest, often not much longer
to fix a low score.

• Aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of 60 percent. That’s Plain

English. If you’re writing for a specialist audience, you could go
lower but remember, nobody asked you for this stuff.

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