One of the first rules in writing is know your audience! Any time you sit down to compose the next great literature piece you must ask yourself who the audience is or how do they think and listen, for example. The more you can narrow your audience the more your piece can relate to them.

Some important characteristics to know of your audience may be their age or education level – both of which can greatly affect the words or sentence structured used as you articulate your thoughts to the paper or screen. While your English teacher may leave impressed with the abundance of $5 words it may not fly with your audience. Communication doesn’t have to be eloquent to be effective – and sometimes flowery words and structure cloud over the message you are trying to deliver.

So what is appropriate or how much is too much if your target is the clichéd general audience? Microsoft Word actually has a readability algorithm built-in that can provide statistics for the works you’ve created. At which point you can assess the results and adjust.

Access the Word Options from the Microsoft Office Orb icon in the upper left hand corner of Microsoft Office.

On the Options dialog look for the Proofing tab. Under the tab scroll down to the location titled When correcting spell and grammar in Word and check-off the option Show readability statistics.

Within Word hit F7 to initiate the readability statistics report.

Here you can see this article you are consuming registers at a grade level of 9.4 – meaning a student around grade 9 or 10 should be able to digest and understand the English used throughout. Pretty interesting, isn’t it?