There’s a couple of ways to test whether people can easily read what you write.

Most versions of MsWord have the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test buried in the ‘Tools’ menu as part of the spelling and grammar check.

I prefer the Gunning fog index of reading ease, which you can work out for yourself

Gunning was an American businessman who developed a very clever algorithm for finding out how easy a text is to read.

You take a discrete passage of 100 words or so out of your document at random.

Don’t omit any sentences.

 Divide the number of words by the number of sentences to get the average sentence length.

Count the number of words of more than three syllables, but leave out proper nouns, compound words or words with suffixes (-ing, -ed etc) or familiar jargon.

Turn this number into a percentage of the 100 words, then add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words.

Then multiply the figure you get by 0.4.

If the result is 12, then you’re writing at the reading level of the average US high school senior - a year 12 student here in Australia.

Bear in mind that Australian tabloid newspapers aim at a wide audience by writing at the reading level of the average 11 year old.

So if you want to reach the widest possible audience with your message, you’d want to find your fog index much lower than 12.

If you can manage a score of 9, you’re getting there.

Try it on something you’ve written

I do it all the time and I’m always surprised by the result as compared with what I’m aiming for.

It actually helps me write the plainest of plain English. 

I scored 8.4 on a random sample from this text, which is very close to hitting the mark! I