As technical professionals, those of us in the IT field tend to lean towards writing with technical language when we are communicating with others, whether that is with other members of our own teams or with business users or customers. While we may find our technical writing easy to understand, that may not be the case for others that we are working with.

Recently I was writing an email to a business customer in another part of my company who we made a custom chat bot for, trying to explain to her how the bot was able to give great answers even if the information it was providing was not explicitly written within the documentation we had given the bot for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model. Writing that email turned into a 20 minute learning experience of how I could simplify my explanation to a level that a normal business user would understand. I’m not sure why this idea popped into my head today, but I remembered that there are online services that will check the reading level of your writing, so I put my email draft into one of those and was surprised by the outcome and knew I needed to rewrite the email to be easier to understand for non-technical people.

What’s in this post

Average U.S. Adult Reading Level

Based on different studies and models, it is estimated that the average reading level for an adult in the United States is around the 7th-8th grade level[1]. There are other estimates that say that 54% of adults in the U.S. have a 6th grade reading level or below[2], which is a startling statistic.

I bring those statistics into this post because they point out why we as technical professionals may need to change our writing behaviors, especially when communicating with non-technical business users or customers. We need to make sure others understand what we are trying to say. If we are writing at a college level but the average person can only comprehend up to a 7th or 8th grade level, there are going to be misunderstandings.

Check Reading Level Online

In the email I was writing about how our chat bot worked, when I realized that it was overly complicated from a business user’s perspective, I started researching concrete changes I could make to how I wrote the message to make it more understandable to a normal, non-technical person. I love being in the weeds of the technicalities, but I know most of our business customers don’t; they only want to know how to use the tool to help themselves.

The best resources I found were the “Hemingway Editor Readability Checker” and then an older PDF document from Montclair State University which walks through getting analysis of writing in Microsoft Word. Jump to the section below to learn more about the Microsoft Word method.

The “Hemingway Editor” is a simple website where you can paste in your text you’d like to check, or provide a full text document, and it will do a quick analysis and highlight sentences that are hard to read, very hard to read, or not hard to read at all. It also gives a numeric “Grade” value indicating at what grade someone would be able to read the text.

When I pasted in my original email draft, it rated it at Grade 14, and marked all sentences in the text as either hard to read or really hard to read.

Screenshot of the Hemingway App readability checker showing a block of text marked with red and yellow highlights for very hard and hard-to-read sentences. The right panel displays a readability grade of 14 and notes that most of the six sentences are difficult to read

That review confirmed that I needed to rewrite the email to be less technical and easier to understand for average people. The website recommends aiming for Grade 9, which is what I tried to do. After a lot of editing, I got the score down to 10, which was as close as I could get to 9 without completely changing what I was trying to communicate.

Screenshot of the Hemingway App readability checker showing a block of text highlighted mostly in yellow, indicating hard-to-read sentences. The right panel reports a readability grade of 10 and notes that 5 of 6 sentences are hard to read, with none marked as very hard.

Check Reading Level with Microsoft Word

If you don’t want to use the online editor to check your writing level, there is also the option to do that through Microsoft Word. Before you can check the reading level, you first must enable an option to do that.

In Word, go to File > “Options”, then “Proofing”. Under that page, check the box for “Show readability statistics”. Click OK to save the change.

Screenshot of Microsoft Word "options" window on the "Proofing" page, demonstrating how to turn on the readability statistics function through a checkbox option.

Once you have enabled the feature, you can then go to the “Review” tab and click the button for “Spelling and Grammar”.

Screenshot of the "Review" ribbon tab at the top of the Microsoft Word screen highlighting the location of the feature "Spelling and Grammar".

When you click that, you will first get a panel that will point out any grammar issues that the program has found. If you don’t care about that, you can click the “X” at the top left of the window (next to “1 remaining”) to close those suggestions.

Screenshot of the first page of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor panel in Microsoft Word

After closing the grammar window, you will then get scores for your writing and recommendations for fixing the writing. There is also an option to check the similarity of the text to what can be found online, which might be useful for teachers and professors that are reviewing the writing of others and who may be concerned about plagiarism.

Screenshot of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor in Microsoft Word, showing the Editor Score of 89% for the document and other corrections, refinements, and features available for checking the document.

If you keep scrolling almost to the bottom of that recommendations panel, you can click on the “Document stats” button under the “Insights” heading, which will bring up a separate window with the reading level information and other details about your writing.

Screenshot showing the bottom of the "Spelling and Grammar" editor screen in Microsoft Word, where you can find the button called "Document Stats" to get insights into your document

While there are other statistics about my writing that could be helpful in other scenarios, what I am most interested for this example is the “Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level”. In this case, Microsoft Word recognizes the same reading level as what the online checker has for my simplified email. Which is cool.

Screenshot of the "Readability Statistics" window in Microsoft Word, which shows the word counts, averages, and readability scores of the document. The reading level of my sample email is 10.0 in this window.

Reading Level for this Post

I got curious while writing this post, wondering what its reading level would be. The answer? 12.2 according to Microsoft Word and 13 according to the online Hemingway Editor.

Screenshot of the "Readability Statistics" window in Microsoft Word, which shows the word counts, averages, and readability scores of the document. The reading level of my blog post is 12.2 in this window.

Screenshot of the Hemingway Editor Readability Checker showing a scoare of Grade 13 for my blog post draft, with 13 of 34 sentences having been marked as very hard to read, and 10 of 34 being marked as hard to read.

I thought it would be higher, so I’m glad to see that it hopefully isn’t unreadable for your average IT professional.

Summary

Technical people are often bad communicators, especially when it comes to interacting with non-technical people. I can’t say that we’re all terrible at it, but many technical degrees require technical communication classes for a reason. I am as guilty of too-elaborate writing as others are. But I am now going to intentionally work on better summarizing myself when emailing and talking with my business users. I would never want to make someone feel dumb because I was talking at too high a level.

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