How do I reduce the reading level for a public document?

Question

I am working on a website about a complicated medical issue for the general public. Are there any easy ways to check the reading level of my website and to make it easier to read if necessary?

Answer 1

Don't reduce a reading level on a complicated medical issue , just find and replace words till you got the best article even if tooks you more space and more reading , than to have a reduce and obscure article !!

Answer 2

software exists that calculates something called the Fog Index for any text processed. The idea is that the more complex the language and the harder the text is to understand the higher the index. The goal is to get the index within a range such that the text is not to childish but also not beyond the majority of people to follow. Obviously picking your range is the trick but by running the tool against what you or others thing are good articles/essays/websites you can get a benchmark.

The sort of things Fog Indexing encourages you to remove are overly long sentences, long and obscure words, dsentences with several conjunctions in them, technical jargon, mixed tenses, sentences with lots of commas in them etc. The tool will not do the work for you but it does tell you how well you are doing. Even if you cannot get hold of one off the net then manually reviewing your text against the sort of criteria I have listed should help.

Answer 3

That is Actually a study at academic level.

Making it easy is not about just words. Usually there is a lot of extra information that clouds the issue. If a text is short, simple but still accurate you have reduced the level.