Writers in the Storm

Readability is a critical part of editing that doesn’t get a lot of attention.  Whether we're imparting instructional analysis or immersing readers in elaborate fantasy worlds, knowing our audience’s preferred reading level is key.

What is readability?

Readability formulas are calculations which are written to assess the reading level necessary for the reader to understand your writing easily.
Readability refers to how easy and enjoyable your writing is for the reader.

Good readability can make a reader quit in paragraph 1 or race through the whole story, so consider readability to make your work sparkle for readers.

Writers Rock When They Meet Reader Expectations

Readability grade level testing is common in elementary schools to categorize books. Length of sentence and the complexity of the words are measured, but grade-level appropriateness does not mean what age a person has to be to read it. Adults use preferred readability levels with different types of text.

Writers benefit from aiming at those levels and better engage their readers, but what age level should a writer use?

General Reading Levels are Lower Than you Expect

If you write technical instructional manuals, you may write at the 13^th grade level, but the general public has a surprisingly lower average.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics on Adult Literacy in the United States, 21% of adults (about 1 in 5) are below a functional reading level.

Readability scores can help an author assess whether their text is appropriate for the intended audience.

A guideline:

• For Basic or Below Basic readers, texts should be written at a 6^th grade level or lower. 
• For the General Public, the average reader, texts should be written around an 8^th grade level.  

But what if your book is for those avid readers, devouring everything literary? Writing for middle school readers would offend those avid readers, right? 

Surprisingly, no.

Writing at a reader’s preferred level doesn’t push them away, it draws them into your work.  It enhances their reading experience, allowing them to spend their energy on the content and quality of writing, rather than having to work to read.  It enables them to get lost in the story and enjoy it.

We Want Our Readers to Keep Reading!

Is your reader a busy professional? Give them easy-to-read content in the limited time they have. A savvy writer takes the extra steps to make their writing clear and easy to understand. It will be appreciated.

Is your reader a graduate student on holiday?  Or a busy mom with a few quiet moments? Allow them a reader’s escape into a tense battle scene or an easy romance, without making them dissect complicated language. Your reader will feel like you are the perfect writing 'host' of their mini getaway.

Is your reader in grade school? Many young readers make breakthroughs and jump quickly though the reading levels, lured along by a good story told well in plain, simple English.

Is your adult reader a limited English speaker or someone who was raised in a culture primarily different from your own? Be sensitive of language barriers that require the reader to work harder to understand your writing. Using appropriate readability will make your writing accessible to a broader audience.

Above all, know your audience! Text-based reading assessments are only a tool to assist your craft. If your audience expects a literary prose with clever turns of phrase and succinct displays of vocabulary, then do so.

How can a writer determine the reading level of their work?

Some tips and resources to help assess your manuscript's readability:

1. Use editing software programs to identify long, sticky sentences, and harder to read passages. Many won’t tell you the reading levels but working on these spots will organically bring the level into General Reading acceptability.

2. Hemingway is an online software that also comes as an app. The program has a free and paid version, but the free was enough for smaller chunks of text when I used it.

When the writer adds their text, Hemingway highlights each sentence with colors to show its reading level. Editing problematic paragraphs within the program helps you achieve a smoother more consistent reading level.

3. Use beta readers to check how logically ideas flow.

Great beta readers will find those confusing places in your book. Run those passages through some readability software. Simplify the work and polish it to it's smoothest readability. Sometimes your readers' confusion comes from the writing itself, rather than the plot.

4. Keep the reader engaged with visuals. Especially for tricky content-dense passages, particularly in non-fiction, use graphs or visuals where appropriate.

5. Use white space as a natural break to focus the reader’s attention.

6. Vary your sentence structure, including shorter passages withing those denser paragraphs to lead your audience. Even when you're writing about complex ideas, sometimes we just need to say what we need to say.

Readability shouldn't detract from one’s style, or keep an author from using higher level vocabulary and structures. In fact, including some of those literary elements in lower reading levels helps readers become more literate! 

To sum up, it is up to you, the writer, to make your words more engaging to the reader.

Concise, jargon and cliche-free writing makes reading a joy to readers. Best of all, it will build a loyal and diverse audience, and build stronger readers in the process.

Is assessing readability part of your editing process? Have you found additional tools to do so? Please share them down in the comments!

Additional Reading: Does your Novel Pass the Readability Test?

About Kris

Kris Maze has worked in education for 25 years and writes for various publications including Practical Advice for Teachers of Heritage Learners of Spanish and Writers in the Storm. Her first YA Science fiction book, IMPACT, arrives in June 2020 and is published through Aurelia Leo.

A recovering grammarian and hopeless wanderer, Kris enjoys reading, playing violin and piano, and spending time outdoors with her family. She also ponders the wisdom of Bob Ross.

Trapped underground with a mysterious scientist named Edison and his chess master AI, can Nala Nightingale find the will to live and to love in a dystopian future?

To find out more about IMPACT, click here.

by Jenny Hansen

We're two weeks into the new year (and a whole new decade!) and I know plenty of writers who made some lofty resolutions. Here at WITS, we keep it simple and stick to one word to guide our writing journey in the new year.

Frankly, one word is about all I can handle at the beginning of January.

The holidays have usually left me breathless. Someone in my family is often sick over that holiday break (this time it was everyone). My house is predictably a raging mess in early January.

But I can do One Word.

I don't know about you, but I print the One Word post out. I tack my paragraph up somewhere noticeable in my house. I make a drawing out of my word. I ponder it.

But here we are mid-January, with 2020 stretching before us -- the Good, the Bad, and the Election. Ugh. I've caught my breath and there are goals to be outlined, and dreams to be chased.

If you are a writer, published or unpublished, I'd guess you’re hoping this New Year will be one that builds your career. So, let's do this!

I challenge you to make at least one concrete writing goal for 2020.

I'll start you off with ideas from one of our early WITS contributors, wise-woman Charlotte Carter. She wrote almost 60 books before she passed on and she knew how to get the work done.

Charlotte's advice for writing success.

1. Make writing a priority. It’s way too easy to get off track if you don’t stick to your guns. Family and friends make demands on you. A good movie opens at the local theater, you promise yourself that you’ll get back to your writing schedule tomorrow. Don’t count on it!

2. Spend time with other writers. No one understands a writer’s fears, failures and successes like another writer. Not even your mother.

3. Don’t let the business get you down. Nora Roberts says, and I believe her, that it was hard to get published when she started writing. It's still hard. Get used to it.

4. Develop a presence on the Internet. Editors do check authors’ blogs and websites. But remember Resolution #1 - don’t spend all of your writing time fussing with your online exposure and forget about your career goals.

5. Improve your craft. Attend workshops and conferences, take classes online, find a critique group that will encourage you and help you to grow. This is part of making your writing a priority.

6. Keep yourself mentally and physically healthy. Yep, you do have to exercise, spend time with friends and family, and find ways to fill your creative well.

7. Read. A lot. Both in and out of the genre you’re writing. I guarantee that won’t be a burden.

Now it's your turn, WITS Readers! Instead of One Word, what is your One Thing? A class you've dreamed of...a story that won't leave you alone? Perhaps you've been waiting to tackle a different genre or start a blog. Share your One Thing with us down in the comments!

Here’s to making one of your dreams come true in 2020...

About Jenny

By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 18 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Facebook at JennyHansenAuthor or at Writers In The Storm.

by Barbara Linn Probst

There’s a special writing area I’ve created for myself. A glass-topped desk with very little to clutter the surface: laptop, coffee mug, desk lamp, and my little “owl with tiara” mascot.

The desk faces a large window that looks out on trees and distant hills. No houses, cars, or people. A black ergonomic chair.

I like having this special, dedicated place. I do other things there—emails, PayPal, cropping my photos—but mostly it’s where I write. The time of day varies, from early morning to late at night; the place, less so. 

I wondered what other people did, what their writing spaces were like. So I asked.

I posted a photo of my desk on a few Facebook groups for writers and invited people to respond with their own photos or descriptions. A lively discussion ensued, with dozens of people taking part.

Here’s what I learned and what I think it means.

---

It seems there are three workspace camps.

The cave-dwellers.  In one camp were those, like me, who needed quiet and calm. 

• I have a loft room called the tower
  where I look out over the trees to the river and the mountains. This is a place
  where I can hide from the world below.
• A quiet room. Serene jewel toned
  walls, comfy chair and tea. I don’t even want music.
• I prefer more of a cave situation—no-to-little
  outside stimulation, certainly no music or background talking to distract me.
• I have a She-Shed. I need complete
  quiet.
• I have to have complete silence so I
  can hear myself think.

Among the cave-dwellers, some found a beautiful view helpful:

• I've got a beautiful view that keeps
  me peaceful.
• I do best outside in sight of
  natural beauty.
• Next to the window overlooking our
  local church and gorgeous old town. Very inspiring.

Others, in contrast, found views distracting.

• A view would distract me from the
  images in my mind.
• No views. I need to focus and am
  afraid if I looked out the window I’d start taking pictures instead of writing.
  

The white-noisers.  In another camp were the people who concentrated best in coffee shops and places filled with lots of background noise.

• I like the anonymity within the
  usually jovial background.
• I go to a very busy cafe where they
  let you linger and everyone has laptops. There’s
  something about the vibe. 
• I like writing in Starbucks. I like
  that it forces a couple of hours of focus before I've overstayed my welcome and
  need to pack up and go home.
• I think there is something about the
  shared work environment, the white noise, and the lack of domestic distractions
  that works really well.

The anywhere-and-everywhere writers.  A third group wrote wherever and whenever they could. For some, this was because it was the only realistic option. Others simply stopped and wrote when an idea struck them.

• Literally anywhere. I’ve learned not
  to be picky.
• I write when and where I can—in my
  office, yes, but also at the kitchen table, at the library, at the ballet
  school, between rounds of History Bee. I take what I get.
• It doesn't matter if it's home, in a
  coffee shop, a hotel room, a park or if it's serene, chaotic, noisy, or a mess
  as long as I can sit with my laptop on my lap.
• In my car, on the open. I scribble
  on a legal pad at stoplights and record dialogue on my phone. Anytime.
  Anyplace.
• I can write anywhere I get an idea,
  thanks to dictation/notes on my phone and a lightweight laptop I carry everywhere.
  

---

Three different answers, right? Or maybe not.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that everyone was doing the same thing. In one way or another, they were creating a sealed-off environment where the world of the story could dominate, rather than the world of ordinary life.

They did this by entering a special place or a special time. Three hours every Monday night at Starbucks. A corner of the basement—“it’s cluttered, but it’s mine.” A special armchair or a space in an unused bedroom. During the hour-long train ride to work.

In order to enter the story world, they had to subdue or transform the sensory stimulation of the regular world.

Through silence, noise-cancelling headphones, music, or the ambient sounds of strangers, each person erected her own auditory shield—a protective ring, a barrier, that let them focus on the interior world of their imagination.

Visual stimulation seemed less problematic. Perhaps because it’s easier to stay focused on a laptop or notebook, resisting the urge to look elsewhere, than it is to block out the intrusive sounds that reach us without our choosing to attend to them.

In the old Star Trek movies, a deflector shield was raised to ward off incoming energy that was vibrating at a frequency other than that of the shield itself—in other words, to repel distractions as well as dangers.

When we’re trying to write, incoming impressions that aren’t relevant to the story world need to be repelled—so we create our personal shields.  One person summed it up well: “Above all, a place where I’m alone with my thoughts. I can be in a crowded place as long as I don’t know anyone else or get distracted.”

It’s the internal place that really matters. The external place is just the container. Without that dedicated internal place—that special state of immersion in the world of our characters—the most exquisite, well-appointed office won’t necessarily help. Sometimes the external place, with its accessories and associations, does help us shift into the internal one.

At other times, when we don’t have access to the time or place where we believe we write best, we find another way. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe painted inside her car when the weather was too hot in the New Mexico desert. At a workshop I attended, renowned author Alice Hoffman told us that she often writes on her iPhone. 

We write—when, where, and because we must.

---

What about you?

Where do you write best? What are the key elements of that environment? Is there a place that’s surprisingly conducive to writing for you—a place that might seem odd to others, but works for you?

What are the essential “writing shields” you need?

Are you getting what you need, or are there small changes you can make in your writing space that would help?

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst is the author of Queen of the Owls, coming in April 2020 from the visionary, award-winning She Writes Press. Queen of the Owls has been chosen by Working Mother as one of the twenty most anticipated books for 2020 and will be the May 2020 selection of the Pulpwood Queens, a network of more than 780 book clubs throughout the U.S. To pre-order or learn more, please visithttp://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/

A chance meeting with a charismatic photographer will forever change Elizabeth’s life.

This novel asks the question: How much is Elizabeth willing to risk to be truly seen and known?

Click here to read more, or to pre-order the book.