“Ah! You want to teach others how to write better. Don’t you think this is audacious?”

“No Prasna. I am going to share a few tips about what I have learnt over the years. These are simple things everybody can use.”

“Ok, then go on.”

The Internet has changed the way people look at reading and writing. You may or may not read books and magazines. However, if you are using the internet, you have no choice. You are subjected to good, bad and indifferent writing. If you happen to write, then you probably inflict the same suffering to others.

Why is good writing important? The first reason is simple. If people do not understand what you say, you cannot influence their thinking or behaviour. In addition, what you write creates an impression in their minds about you. Their perception about you is influenced by the quality of your writing. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, incomplete sentences etc signal to the reader impressions about you, which may not be favourable. You may have an important point to make but may lose your reader because of these issues.

There is a simple way to start improving the quality of your writing. If you use Microsoft Word, you not only get help on spelling and grammar but also on your writing style. It even gives you a readability report. The report shows how readable your writing is and how easy it is for people to understand. The length of your sentence (the number words in a sentence), affects readability and understanding. The way you use active voice or passive voice in your sentences affects your style and readability. I have been consciously using this feature from Word for several years now. I know it works well because people have commented about my writing. I generally keep my sentence lengths to a maximum of 12 to 15 words. If my sentence is wordy, the software says so. If I use passive voice in my sentence, it says so; and I can correct it. If I use a sentence without a verb in it, it shows up as a fragment. I have to write a complete sentence to set it right. The spell check however may not be reliable. In the last sentence if I had used the word write instead of right, spell check would not have detected it. It cannot make out the difference between their and there. That is a small flaw.

I just checked the readability report for what I have written till here. Here is what the report says:

Number of words: 413

Words per sentence: 11.3

Passive sentences: 0%

Flesch reading ease: 67.1

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.6

The Flesch Reading Ease readability score formula rates text on a 100-point scale based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. The higher the Flesch Reading Ease score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of approximately 60 to 70.

Flesch Kincaid Grade Level is a way of measuring the readability of a certain text. In other words, it uses a mathematical formula to calculate the difficulty of the writing and to estimate the grade level that the reader must be at in order to readily understand the text.

There is also something called a Fog scale indicator. The Fog scale is similar to the Flesch scale in that it compares syllables and sentence lengths. ‘Foggy’ words are words that contain 3 or more syllables. The fog score is then composed by taking the percent of foggy words multiplied by 100 added to the sentence length. That result is than multiplied by .4

A fog score of 5 is readable, 10 is hard, 15 is difficult, and 20 is very difficult. However MS Word does not give you this score.

There is one more thing you can do to improve your writing. Draton Bird one of the world’s best direct mail writers suggests that we write passionately and edit carefully. When I worked in Ogilvy we used one more method. For example, I used to share my advertising strategy documents with colleagues who were tough critics. They would tear the document apart but the final output would be excellent. McKinsey employs editors who would subject proposals and documents to tough scrutiny.

“Is that true?”

“Yes, Prasna. I met Jeanne-Subramaniam, who was an editor in McKinsey’s Mumbai office, several years ago.”

“Let us see how many people read this piece!”