Five Easy Steps To Get Your Audience To Read What You Write

In a recent interview, grammarian expert Laura Jarnat revealed five easy steps to get your audience to read what you write.  Laura has been a speaker and trainer for 15 years and has a passion for grammar.  In fact, she will tell you she reads the Great Reference Manual for fun.  Follow Laura’s advice in these five easy steps and your audience will be more likely to read what you write.

1.  Consider your reader’s time and focus on what they want. Write at a level that is optimum for your reader to undersand. The current standard, and has been for a few years, is to write at the 8th grade level. You  may think that’s ridiculous and a reflection of the educaition system in our country today. Really, it has to do with a commodity called “time” that we have in short supply. Very simply, it takes time to read anything that’s written at greater than the 8th grade level.

2.  To immediately get your reader’s attention, make that first paragraph a maximum of four lines. We only have five seconds in which to engage the reader. If we hit them with a nice short paragraph to begin with, then we have an increased probability that they’re going to read the document.

3.  Make each sentence an average of about 15 words per sentence. You don’t want every single sentence to be the same length. That gets boring and singsong at a point. So, you may have some shorter sentences and some longer sentences. However, if you can average about 15 words per sentence, that’s where you want to be.

4.  Then if you keep each paragraph no longer than six, sometimes, seven, or eight lines, you increase your readability potential further. If you have big fat paragraphas, visually it’s not appealing to the reader. The perception of the reader is this is going to be hard to read.

Although it may not necessarily be true, that’s your reader’s perception, which is your reader’s reality. If they think it’s going to be hard to read, they’re not even going to try and you’ve lost that five second advantage, even if you start them with a nice short paragraph.

5.  Writing in the active voice is one of the best things that you can do to write better. Passive voice is so common, and it’s one of those self-perpetuating things. People write in the passive voice because somebody taught them to. Those people wrote in the passive voice because somebody else taught them to, and so forth, down from the past. Nevertheless, it’s not the current preferred style.

Even though we know it’s better to use the active voice, we universally ignore this advice. That’s really a shame, because passive voice is just not good effective writing.

If you’re using the computer, and who isn’t to write these days, and if you’re using Micosoft Word, a tool that makes ascertaining these statistics easier is the grammar check. If you’re like me, you avoid this like the plague. I did until Laura pointed out how useful it is.

One of the things that were particularly annoying to me about the grammar check was the advice that I had just written something using the passive voice. Then I discovered that when I grudgingly changed that to an acceptable active voice, the writing was much better and clearer.

I wasn’t sure what the Readability Statistics that appeared at the end meant. Laura informed me that the only stats I had to pay attention to were:

• The word per sentence that gives me the average words per sentence
• The number of passive sentences
• The Flesch Reading Ease
• The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

That was much easier to accept. For your information, this article is 899 words, the average words per sentence is 15, and there are no passive sentences. The readability ease is 65.8 (I would like higher, but that’s okay), and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level is 8 (terrific). Following the advice of expert grammarian Laura Jarnat has made my writing easier and clearer. Run your next article thorugh the grammar check and see if you don’t agree with us.