Writing For Your Audience or A Better Flesch Kincaid Redability Score - A Conundrum

bysmokeywins

3.5K followers

6 years ago

It has been awhile since I posted any new content on my website. Although I had the best of intentions to keep up with posting fresh content to my site at least once a week, life, my health in particular got in the way.

As a breast cancer survivor, my oncologist placed me on a newly approved medication designed to target a specific aspect of my cancer. This medication was supposed to help prevent recurrence. Needless to say, the quality of life I was experiencing while on this medication for less than two months, was not worth the minimal 2%-3% decrease in chance of recurrence over a 2-year period.

I have been off the medication for about a month now, and I am slowly starting to get back to normal. Seeing that one of my earlier blog posts had ranked on page one earlier this week also helped to give me a little bit of the motivation needed to get back to this blogging thing.

So, yesterday I created new content for my website. I am a rep for a health and wellness product, and yesterday was the release of the latest seasonal shake flavor. Writing tends to come somewhat naturally to me, and the only change I made when writing this latest post was to find a good quality keyword on Jaaxy prior to writing.

Having installed the Yoast plugin a few months ago, I found that this little tool was quite helpful in ensuring my content was configured properly for search engines, and was readable without being keyword stuffed.

After I finished writing my post, I scrolled down to check my stats, and happened to notice a somewhat low ranking, of around 56, for my flesch kincaid readability score. Apparently, according to Yoast, my content falls in the fairly difficult to read area. The recommendation was to try to shorten my sentences to make it easier to read.

Since I hold a BS in Computer Science, I have spent most of my career in technical support. In addition to side gigs in freelance writing, as well selling on various e commerce platforms. I have always written my content with the goal of getting my point across without being to wordy. So this ranking caused me to start second guessing myself. I spent most of the day re-reading my content and making changes to make the flesch kincaid readability score happy, but the best I was able to score was about a 59. Which then started triggering issues with transition words and passive voice.

The more I tried to appease the flesch kincaid readability score gods, the more my content seemed choppy and not as easy to read. I couldn't help but wonder if I was doing myself more harm than good by focusing more on a score than the content I was creating.

This poses the question, should we be focusing on a readability score, or on creating quality content that focuses on our audience.

To be honest, I think a lot of it has to do with what you are writing about. My product falls in the health and wellness realm, and I needed to include specific scientific information as to why our product was better than others on the market. Trying to raise my flesch kincaid readability score ended up sacrificing the "meat" of my post. How can I ensure a reader is informed, if I change the words and sentence structure? In my opinion, I can't.

Thirty revisions later, and nearly my entire day spent on just this one post, I finally clicked the Post button with a score of 57.2. The more I think about it, I almost wish I could go back in time and just post what I started with, instead of wasting so much time trying to achieve a number that it seems my writing style and vocabulary is currently incapable of achieving, even with the help of a Thesaurus.

So, what are your thoughts on the flesch kincaid readability score? Do you really think it has an effect on the actions of our readers, or is just a number designed to drive us batty?