If you’re anything like me then you are obsessed with creating a highly usable website. Making your content accessible to the greatest number of people possible may be the single most important task you have as a blogger – or any web site developer for that matter. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Approach to Web Usability advises writers to attempt to write at no more than a 6th grade reading level. I find this difficult to do because frankly I have always taken to writing as an art form and the process of dumbing it down can feel like obeying an anti-creative grade school art teacher. How’s that for an understandable sentence?

Blogger Steven Johnson wrote a very interesting post on writing by numbers. He used Text Stats from Amazon to make interesting observations regarding sentence length. Once again the verdict is obvious: keep it short and simple. Interested in finding out what reading level you are writing at? Try out this Reading Level Calculator.