You’ve heard it a million times: Don’t make the audience work too hard to absorb your content. One way to keep it simple is to target an eighth-grade reading level, which you can check for with every piece of content you create on the platform using the WriterAccess Language Grader. This video shows you how.

You may have heard that 80% of Americans can read at an eighth-grade level, and that's a good target for a lot of brands. But how do you know what grade level your content is suited for?

With the WriterAccess Language Grader, that's how. 
1.        Go to Platform Tools.
2.        Click Language Grader. Eyes on your own paper. No cheating!
3.        Copy and paste at least 200 words from your content.
4.        Then click Analyze Now. 

You'll get three different scores:

1.        Flesch Reading Ease
2.        Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level 
3.        Gunning Fog Index

The Flesch Reading Ease measures from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the easier it is to read. A reading score of 60 or 70 puts you at about the eighth or ninth-grade level, suitable for 13 to 15-year-olds. 

The Flesch Kincaid Grade Level score ranges from 1 to 18, with the number equivalent to about the grade level. So the highest score is 18, and that would be suitable for a like advanced college level readers.

The Gunning Fog Index measures the level of education the reader would need to understand your content after a single read-through. So for your eighth-grade level target, you'd want to score around an eight or below. 

Now for some pro tips:

Think an eighth-grade level is too low for your audience? 
•        Ernest Hemingway’s text measures in at about a fourth-grade reading level.
•        Popular horror books measure in it about a sixth-grade reading level. 

It's OK for your text to have a lower reading level. It allows you to reach the widest viable audience. And it doesn't make your readers work too hard to understand your message. They have plenty of other things on their mind, anyway.