Readability editing

What readability editing is

Readability editing lowers the mechanical difficulty of a piece of writing without changing what it says. It works on the measurable things: how long the sentences are, how many clauses they carry, how many syllables the words have, how long the paragraphs run, and whether the structure lets a reader find the point without reading everything before it. Meaning stays where it was. Effort comes down.

It is a narrower job than plain-language editing, which replaces specialist vocabulary wholesale and restructures a document to meet a standard, usually because a regulator or a sector expects it. Readability editing does not aim at a standard. It aims at a reader who is tired, on a phone, and deciding within a few lines whether to keep going.

It is also not readability improvement, which is the same craft applied to live web pages and done in the site itself, page by page. This service is for documents: a proposal, a brochure, a report, a sales sheet, a set of pages in a file before they ever reach a site.

When you need one

When you already know the writing is heavy and you do not want it rewritten. A proposal that keeps losing readers in the middle. A brochure written by the founder, who knows the subject too well and writes as though everyone else does. A service document assembled from three older documents, each with its own sentence habits. Anything that will be read by a buyer rather than a colleague.

It is also the right service when a technical person has written something accurate that nobody outside the trade finishes. The accuracy is not the problem and I do not touch it.

You do not need this if the document is simply too long. Cutting is a different job, and tightening long copy is the cheaper and more useful one. You do not need it either if the difficulty comes from sentences that can be read two ways rather than sentences that are hard work; that is clarity editing. And if the document carries obligations a reader must act on correctly, go straight to plain-language editing instead.

What gets changed

I read the document once as a buyer would and mark every place I slowed down. Then I work through it against the mechanics.

• Sentence length. The long ones are split at their natural joint. A sentence carrying three ideas becomes three sentences, or one sentence and a short list. Length is varied deliberately, because a page of uniformly short sentences reads like an instruction manual.
• Word weight. Long words are replaced where a short one carries the same meaning, and left alone where it does not. “Utilise” becomes “use”. “Endeavour to ensure” becomes “make sure”. A technical term stays, because replacing it would make the sentence wrong.
• Paragraph size. Blocks of eight or ten lines are broken where the thought turns. On a phone a long paragraph is a wall, and readers skip walls.
• Sentence shape. Front-loaded conditions are moved behind the main statement. Passive constructions that hide who acts are turned around. Chains of nouns are unpacked into verbs.
• Structure. The point of each section moves to its first sentence, subheadings are added where a reader needs a handhold, and anything that is really a list stops pretending to be a paragraph.

Readability formulas exist and I run them, but as a rough gauge before and after, not as a target. A formula counts syllables; it cannot tell that a short sentence is confusing. The judgement stays human.

What you get

The edited document. A clean version in your original format, plus a tracked-changes version showing every edit, so you can see what moved and reject anything you disagree with.

The before-and-after note. Two pages. The patterns I found and fixed, with a handful of your own sentences shown in their original and edited form side by side. This is the part people keep, because it is the fastest way for whoever writes the next document to stop causing the same problem.

The query list. Short. Any sentence I could not simplify without risking the meaning, written out with the question I need answered before I touch it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An Ontario company that sells and services standby generators has a 12-page proposal template and four service pages in a document, all written by the owner, who trained as an electrical engineer. The average sentence runs past forty words and most paragraphs fill half a page. Buyers are facility managers and property owners, not engineers, and the sales team says people arrive at meetings having read the first page only.

The edit splits the long sentences, breaks the paragraphs at their turns, and replaces about sixty heavy words with plain ones while leaving every technical term in place. Three passages about load calculation and transfer switching are left almost untouched, because simplifying them would have made them wrong; instead each gets a one-sentence summary above it so a non-technical reader can skip the detail knowingly. The proposal loses a page and a half purely through sentence surgery. The owner's note afterwards is that the document now sounds like him talking, which is what he had been trying to write in the first place.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the document is, who reads it, where you think they stop, and what must not be changed. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on word count and on how far the writing sits from where it needs to be.
3. You send the document. In an editable format, with a note of any terms, phrases or legal wording that must survive untouched.
4. The edit. Structure first, then sentences, then words. Three to seven working days for most documents under 5,000 words.
5. Delivery. Clean copy, tracked changes, the before-and-after note and the queries. One round of revisions is included.

What it costs

Readability editing is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work varies with how heavy the writing is, not just how much of it there is. A tidy document that needs its paragraphs broken up is a small job; a dense one that needs every sentence taken apart is not. The pricing page sets out the four ways I work so you can see where this sits. The number is agreed in writing before I start.

What happens next

Most people take the before-and-after note and apply it to the next document themselves, which is the intended outcome. If the edit showed that the real trouble is the order things come in rather than the sentences, the follow-up is reordering and headings. If the same document is also going online, accessible document copy makes the headings and link text work for a screen reader as well as a skimmer. And where a document must be understood rather than merely read easily, that is plain-language editing, and I will say so before you buy the smaller job. This edit is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.