The text accessibility is evaluated on two scores: The Readability and the Word Count.
Readability score
This score tells us how easy your text is to read.
The readability score uses something called the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score, which ranges from 0 (Extremely difficult to read. Best understood by university graduates.) to 100 (Very easy to read. Easily understood by an average 11-year-old student.). We calculate a score for your text, and then we compare it to scores from other texts in our database. This shows you how well your text performs in terms of readability in comparison with others.
Here’s what the readability score means:
- If your score is between 0 and 19, your text is much harder to read than most texts. Try using shorter sentences and simpler words to make it easier to understand.
- If your score is between 20 and 25, your text is somewhat harder to read than the average text. Consider breaking up long sentences and using common words to improve readability.
- If your score is between 26 and 29, your text is just fine! It’s as readable as the average text.
- If your score is between 30 and 34, your text is more readable than the average text.
- If your score is higher than 34, congratulations! Your text is a lot more readable than most texts.
There are only good reasons to get the score up the scale.
These days, most job ads are published online. It has many benefits, but note that several studies find that we skim much more when reading online. Therefore you want each of your sentences to be easy to understand in a glance.
It can be tricky in job ads as we tend use long industry terms and specialized language. But this is not necessarily needed, even in ads for highly senior roles. People who are well trained readers, actually prefer easier texts more than less trained readers, studies have shown.
Get the score up like this
Improving your readability score means that your text gets easier to read. The higher the score, the higher the readability. You do this by using shorter and fewer words pr. sentence.
Here are a few examples:
“Achieve an objective” “meet a target”
“Carry out an evaluation of” “Evaluate”
“If this is the case” “If so”.
“Concerning” “on”.
Word count
The total number of words in the text.
There is an ideal length for your text. For example, in the case of job ads, we suggest job ads between 300 and 650 words. This holds the applicant’s interest and also conveys the complete message. Should the job ad be too short, you may fail to deliver your intended message. Conversely, if it’s too long, you may lose the attention or interest of potential applicants.