Focusing on readability is not dumbing down
It's opening up
I measured how readable the websites of some of the UK’s largest cultural organisations are.
The results aren’t great.
Background
The average person in the UK has the reading ability expected of a 9 year old.
The National Literacy Trust’s research show’s that 16.4% of adults in England, or 7.1 million people, can be described as having 'very poor literacy skills.'
“They can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources, but reading information from unfamiliar sources, or on unfamiliar topics, could cause problems. This is also known as being functionally illiterate.”
Research also estimates that there are 1.5 million people in the UK with a learning disability and around 7 million people with dyslexia.
Why does this matter to the cultural sector?
Cultural organisations need to attract new audiences and visitors.
This means that they need to reach people that they don’t already talk to, or who don’t think that whatever that cultural organisation is offering is for them.
That requires cultural organisations to talk in a way that can be understood by those people and is meaningful to them.
It’s simple, if we make our writing easier to read, we make it easier for more people to understand what we are saying.
And that means you could reach and be understood by millions more people in the UK alone.
I am focusing on websites because it is likely that the website will form at least some part (possibly a very large part) of an individual’s interaction with you.
Where are we now?
I have taken some random samples of text from 13 UK cultural organisations’* websites to see how they rate in terms of readability.
These organisations include theatre, opera, ballet, art galleries, museums and orchestras.
All these organisations say that they are interested in creating cultural experiences that ‘everyone’ can enjoy.
Testing
To measure the readability of the text I used Hemingway and ReadabilityScore (there are lots of other tools available, but these two are free).
Hemingway gives a piece of text a ‘readability score’ in Grades. So text with a Grade 5 score is easier to read than text with a Grade 16 score. What this measurement gauges is the education needed to understand the text.
ReadabilityScore gives a text lots of scores, but I am going to use three for this post: “Flesch Reading Ease” gives a text a score between 1 and 100, with 100 being the highest readability score. Scoring between 70 to 80 is equivalent to school grade level 8. This means text should be fairly easy for the average adult to read; “Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level” estimates the level of education required to read the text, so a Grade 1 rating means the text is easier to read than a Grade 12 rating; and finally a “Gunning Fog Index”, this also estimates the level of education required to be able to read and understand the text.
The results: About us pages
You can see all the results in this spreadsheet.
I have included the results for content from the Guardian, Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph and Daily Mirror websites for comparison.
Hemingway Grade score (Hemingway recommends aiming for Grade 9):
Hardest to read: Post-graduate (a museum and a ballet company)
Easiest to read: Grade 7 (a theatre and a performing arts centre)
Flesch Reading Ease score (it’s advised to aim for a score of 60+):
Hardest to read: 14.64 (a ballet company)
Easiest to read: 76.03 (a performing arts centre)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score (a score of 5-11 should mean the text readable for 80% of readers in the USA)
Hardest to read: 20.12 (a ballet company)
Easiest to read: 9.16 (an opera company)
Gunning Fog score (it is recommended to aim for a score of 7-8):
Hardest to read: 24.19 (a ballet company)
Easiest to read: 13.3 (a dance organisation)
The results: Production/Exhibition pages
You can see all the results in this spreadsheet.
I have included the results for content from the Guardian, Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph and Daily Mirror websites for comparison.
Hemingway Grade score (Hemingway recommends aiming for Grade 9):
Hardest to read: Post-graduate (an art gallery, and a performing arts centre)
Easiest to read: Grade 9 (a theatre)
Flesch Reading Ease score (it’s advised to aim for a score of 60+):
Hardest to read: 34.47 (a performing arts centre)
Easiest to read: 65.91 (a theatre)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score (a score of 5-11 should mean the text is readable for 80% of readers in the USA):
Hardest to read: 18.64 (an art gallery)
Easiest to read: 8.04 (an opera company)
Gunning Fog score (it is recommended to aim for a score of 7-8):
Hardest to read: 22.28 (an art gallery)
Easiest to read: 9.84 (an opera company)
Things to consider
There are lots of things that make your writing easier or harder to read.
The words you choose to use, the way you structure your sentences, the way that you format your text, all of this impacts how readable your writing is.
I recommend reading Content Design by Sarah Richards.
Reading online happens in quite a different way compared to reading printed materials. People scan the text rather than reading every word.
I recommend investigating and understanding the research that the Nielsen Norman Group have done on this topic. They recently updated their findings, these show that there are three key factors to consider, being concise, scannable, and objective.
Final thoughts
Often when we are encouraging the cultural organisations we work with to write in a way that will be easier to understand, to use less jargon, and to think about how people consume content online, we get told that we are asking them to ‘dumb down’.
There seems to be an impression that by making your content difficult to read, you are somehow making it more valuable.
But all the research shows that by writing and presenting yourselves in this way you are actively excluding the very people you want to reach.
As Sarah Richards says, “it’s not dumbing down, it’s opening up”, and the cultural sector needs to be more open, more welcoming, more accessible, more understandable, more interesting, to more people than ever before.
This has never been more important.
This post is rated Grade 7 by Hemingway (although the first and last sections are marked as ‘very hard to read’).
ReadabilityScore gives it: 64.05 (Flesch Reading Ease), 7.35 (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and 10.42 (Gunning Fog).
*I chose 13 of the UK’s largest cultural organisations in terms of revenue, or funding from Arts Council England and DCMS.
I took a text sample from each organisation’s ‘about us’ page, and from the page of whichever production or exhibition they were promoting most heavily at the moment.