Writing For Product Managers: Readability Is More Persuasive

In my Writing Tips for Product Managers post I suggested making your writing more readable. I mentioned a tool I use called Hemingway. It has both a Mac app and an online version.

In this post I’m going to show how I use Hemingway. (In my upcoming writing course I’ll give a video demonstration of Hemingway.)

Starting from terrible

I’ll start with a paragraph from a blog post I wrote in 2013. It’s not a bad post! But it was before I discovered the importance of readability. In 2015 started using sites like readability-score.com to help me improve my writing’s readability. And then I got Hemingway, which is much more convenient.

The original paragraph reads:

Of course, we have a lot of best practices. We know that requirements are a best practice, but we also know that a lot of successful products have been delivered without much in the way of requirements. We know that prototyping is a great way to converge on a product design, but there are lots of products that don’t have much design that do OK, and lots of beautiful products that sink like cannonballs. We know that having a well-articulated value proposition is a great best practice, but we know lots of companies that manage to do without them, at least initially.

Loading it into Hemingway, I get this:

Hemingway says this paragraph is Grade 12. And its remark is “OK. Aim for 9.” Its assessment of the writing is on the right. I did avoid passive voice and adverbs in the original. But Hemingway deems three sentences “very hard to read.” What makes a sentence hard to read? Length is one criterion. Shorter is better. Length of the words in the sentence also contributes.

You can see that I love to make long sentences. I often put a thought into a sentence, and then expand on the thought. And this can lead to very long sentences. It’s a habit I’m trying to break. Hemingway is helping me.

Making it all better

The first thing I do is to shorten some of my sentences a little bit. A natural place to shorten a sentence is at a comma. For example, in the original we had this very long sentence. It has 28 words!

“We know that requirements are a best practice, but we also know that a lot of successful products have been delivered without much in the way of requirements.”

I shorten it by putting a period in at the first comma. I take off the “We know that…” fragment. It doesn’t add much. Then I rewrite the second clause a bit. As two sentences, the meaning is the same – perhaps even enhanced. And the grade level has dropped to 9.

After I make the same transformation on all the long sentences, I end up with this. Reading level 6. Two-thirds as many words. No passive voice. No adverbs.

Here are the original and the updated paragraphs side by side. The new paragraph now has a grade level of 5.

Readability increases readership!

Improving the readability of your writing is definitely worthwhile! I have found visitors are much more likely to read my blog posts when they are easy to read. Even if your readers are highly educated, they prefer easier-to-read writing.