3 keys to readable white papers

Many white papers are just too hard to read.

Happily, three simple techniques can make any draft easier to read.

Use shorter words. Use shorter sentences. And use shorter paragraphs.

In other words, three keys can make your next white paper easier to read:

• Delete to eliminate long words
• Period (.) to break up long sentences
• Enter to break up long paragraphs

What is readability?

No one can say whether a white paper is clear or well-written, right? That’s all subjective, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

Over the past 75+ years, many formulas have been developed and tested to help measure the readability of English text.

These formulas can’t tell if your sentences make any sense, if your tone suits your target audience, or if your white paper will generate any leads.

But they can give you an excellent idea of how easy your draft is to read.

You don’t have to know these formulas, but you can still use them every day.

And that’s critical to reach today’s distracted, time-pressed executives with crisp, clear white papers.

Using Word’s free readability checker

Did you know there’s a perfectly good readability checker built into Microsoft Word?

Here’s how to use it.

1. From the ribbon in Word, click the Editor button.

2. The Editor window will appear beside your document, as shown here.

Notice the overall score of your document, and the editorial suggestions for spelling, grammar, and conciseness.

You can click any of those to jump right to the sentence in question.

But those aren’t the readability.

3. Under Insights right at the bottom, click Document stats.

4. Then click OK.

Word will review the readability of your document.

In a few seconds, you will see your results in a window like the ones shown below.

One white paper, before and after

A client came to me with a white paper draft their reviewers thought was too hard to read.

So I revised it, capturing Word’s readability stats before and after my revisions.

The readability of the original draft is shown below on the left, with the scores for my revision on the right.

           Readability BEFORE editing

            Readability AFTER editing

Under Counts, the total number of words didn’t change much: Down by 2% from 2,728 to 2,692.

But the number of paragraphs and sentences shot up:

• Paragraphs doubled from 46 to 93, showing the Enter key in action
• Sentences jumped from 95 to 138, thanks to the trusty period (.) key

Under Averages, see how the average number of words per sentence fell dramatically from 27.2 to 17.3.

See how those revisions paid off

The Flesch Reading Ease (the higher, the better) improved by more than a third from 35.4 to 49.6.

And the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (the lower, the better) came down four years from college (14.8) to high school (10.5), another big improvement.

Best of all, the client said my revision was perfect for their audience.

Check out some actual sentences

Now let’s look at some actual sentences to see how my revisions boosted the readability.

Here’s some original text:

Acme’s experience indicates that higher-priced RTB impressions, where our models indicate a higher expected influence in driving advertisers’ goals, were up to 100 times more effective in influencing consumer behavior than lower-priced ones, a pattern that persists across industries, customers and campaigns. This implies that counter to conventional wisdom, in an RTB world, rather than creating value for the advertiser, a media buyer focused too intently on CPM may actually erode it.

(74 words in 2 sentences)

And here’s how I revised it:

Acme has found that paying more for a higher-quality impression through RTB can be up to 100 times more effective at influencing consumer behavior. This pattern applies across industries, customers, and campaigns. This means that in today’s real-time advertising world, focusing too much on CPM can actually limit an advertiser’s results.

(53 words in 3 sentences)

You can get the same kind of results if you focus some energy on rewriting your early drafts for better readability.

Just use those three all-important keys as you write your next white paper: Backspace, period (.) and Enter.

And remember: No one will ever complain that a white paper you wrote is “too easy to understand.”

Originally published 13 June 2014. Last updated 5 August 2024.

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