What makes writing more readable?

These tips were centered around simplification, and they are good tips. For documentation and technical writing in particular, I picked up a few mannerisms that I now use every time I write.

The biggest impact has been to have a goal of limiting a paragraph to 2-3 sentences. From this goal my other writing traits came naturally.

When starting a paragraph, start off with a blunt statement that summarizes the paragraph. Following sentences can back up the summary sentence.

Use a short single-sentence paragraph to make an emphatic point.

Do word qualifiers add to your content? Many times not. Humans add qualifiers and adjectives more than what's necessary to understand a concept.

Readers get bored with monotony. If there's a wall of text, that's boring. If there's a wall of images, that's boring too. I try to break up a document into different types of formatting. Lists, headings, quotes, and image/content sections to make things visually appealing.

These are only goals! Sometimes a big honkin' paragraph is just what the doctor ordered.

Fun language or a well-timed joke keeps things interesting. They can give the reader a well-deserved break. Like the big honkin' paragraph usage above.

Lastly, the presentation of the content is important. Medium got their content width, font size, and colors down well. GitHub did a great job, too.

I learned to do this when a publisher took red ink to a tutorial I wrote. They gave me the goal of shortening all paragraphs to 2-3 sentences. It was tough at first but now I'm a fan. It's a fun writing exercise :-)

> Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice.

Not necessarily? If what you’re writing is intended for a completely general audience, or an audience that follows the distribution of an idealized general audience, maybe. And if the most important goal is understandability as well. But often writing is for purposes and audiences other than that. Taking it as axiomatic that the first and most important goal is comprehension by the widest possible audience suggests you should write at (at most) a fifth or sixth grade level. Anything above that and you’ve already failed at the “obvious best practice”.

What makes writing more readable [for people with learning disabilities or ESL]?

These strategies make writing less readable for the rest of us. The example paragraphs are clunky, and meaning gets lost.

The way they rephrased also simply omitted detail, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison. I'd much rather see an example where no detail is lost but would still have wider comprehension. Literally dumbing it down by stripping detail doesn't seem like a clear best practice.

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

- David McCullough

I agree with many of the other posts here. Some of the translations highlighted in the article seem to either lose important information or introduce confusing information. The most striking example for me was the translation from

> A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language.

to

> Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language.

I agree that "tremor" is an uncommon word and some of the adjectives like "strong", "impossible", and "American" are either superfluous or not strictly necessary. But in the translation, the phrase "hand shakes" coincides with an unrelated but very common thing: a "handshake". This gave me a slight pause when reading. And it's not like it's impossible to do sign language with shaky hands. In this case, it's the degree with which Kyra's hands shake that keeps her from doing sign language, something that is lost in the translation.

All this said, I want to stress that I agree with the premise of the article. We should value accessibility, and writing style is yet another vector that can exclude people. Quibbles about specific sentences shouldn't distract us from that. If anything, they and the lack of an effective algorithm to do this highlight how difficult the task is and probably always will be. Writing well is really, really hard. And the diversity of the audience for this kind of writing I think compounds that.

In fact, I might argue that writing plainly is harder. I think scientific/academic writing can often be considered lazy because it doesn't take the time to consider the audience. This isn't always true, but I think I'm not alone in having slogged through a paper or an article that could have used an editor. But it didn't get sufficient editing because, and again I stress, writing well is really, really hard.