Step Six: Review Readability

If you are reading this page, you probably have a good education and unusually sharp reading skills. Most of your fellow citizens don’t. Step Six in the Environmental Message Method is to ensure that your overall reading level is suitable for the intended audience. The step is optional because it only suitable for pieces with several hundred words or more.

Professional linguists agree that three traits help predict how easy a passage of text is for the public read:

• Longer sentences are harder to read than shorter sentences.
  Longer words are harder to read than shorter words.
  Sentences in the passive voice are harder to read than sentences in the active voice.

The first two principles are self-explanatory. The last principal deserves some extra explanation.

Passive: A voluntary land protection agreement was signed for the farm.
Active: The farmer signed a voluntary land agreement for her farm

Passive: The wetland petition was signed by more than 800 citizens
Active: More than 800 residents signed the petition in support of protecting the wetland.

Passive: $3500 was raised for the new boardwalk along the marsh
Active: More than 30 donors contributed a total of $3500 to build the boardwalk along the marsh.

In a nutshell, writing in the passive voice is lazy. It is easy to write — and hard to read. When you analyze government and scientific writing, you will sometimes find that as much as 60% of the text is in the passive voice. When you rewrite this work to emphasize the active voice, you will immediately notice the difference in how quickly and easily you can skim or read the piece.

Linguists have devised any number of systems to evaluate the readability of text passages. Water Words That Work recommends that you check the Flesch Reading Ease score for all your messages that you intend for nonprofessional audiences. We prefer this system for two reasons:

• It’s built right in to Microsoft Word, so it’s readily available to you.
• The 1-100 scale is more useful than a grade-level scale

Here’s how you can interpret your scores:

In our experience, conservation professionals tend to naturally write at a Flesch Reading Ease score of 35-45 unless you make a conscious effort to write more inclusively.

Here is how use the Flesch Reading Ease tool when you are write your piece:

• Determine your optimal Flesch Reading Ease score.
• Check the actual Flesch Reading Ease score or your draft.
• Edit your piece — break up long sentences, replace long words, rewrite passive sentences.
• Check your score again.
• Repeat until you achieve your optimal Flesch Reading Ease score.

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