Readability improvement

What readability improvement is

Readability improvement is a mechanical pass over a page that says the right things and says them in a way that is tiring to read. Long sentences are split. Long paragraphs are broken up. Buried lists are set as lists. Sentences in the wrong order are moved. The meaning is unchanged, the claims are unchanged, and the vocabulary is unchanged.

That last point is the boundary. If a page uses a specialist word, the specialist word stays. Replacing it is a different service: a plain-language rewrite changes what the page is made of, this changes only how it is assembled. That is why the two are priced differently and why one of them needs your technical people involved and the other does not.

It is also not a rewrite. A page rewrite decides which sentences should exist at all. Here, every sentence on the page survives in some form. If half of them should not exist, you want the rewrite and I will say so.

When you need one

You need it when the page is correct and people still bounce off it. Somebody who knows the subject wrote it and did a good job of being accurate. It is one wall of text with sentences that run forty words, and a reader gives up two paragraphs in.

You need it when the page is read on phones. Copy written for a wide screen turns into a column of unbroken grey on a small one, and the same paragraph that looked like four lines becomes fourteen.

You need it when a page is legally or technically constrained and nobody is permitted to change the wording. Compliance language, regulated claims, approved product descriptions: the words are fixed, but the sentence boundaries and the order usually are not.

You do not need it if the problem is that the answer is at the bottom. That is page structure and headings, which is narrower and cheaper. And if the material is a document rather than a live page, the editing pillar handles it as readability editing.

What gets changed

Everything on this list is mechanical. None of it requires a decision about what the page means.

• Sentence length. Long sentences are split at their natural joints. A sentence carrying three ideas becomes three sentences, and the average across the page comes down without every sentence becoming short, which reads as a lecture to a child.
• Paragraph length. Two to four sentences, one idea each, checked at phone width rather than on a desktop screen.
• Lists that were hiding. Any sentence containing three or more parallel items becomes a list. This is the single change that makes the biggest difference and the one people most often miss.
• Order within a section. The point first, then the qualification, then the detail. Most difficult paragraphs are difficult because they arrive in the reverse order.
• Connective words and signposts. The small words that tell a reader whether the next sentence agrees with the last one or contradicts it. Adding them costs nothing and saves a re-read.

What does not change: terminology, claims, numbers, names, tone, and the order of the sections themselves unless you ask for that as well.

What you get

The revised page. A document with the new text, ready to go into the site, laid out as it will appear rather than as continuous prose.

A marked-up comparison. The old and new side by side with every change visible, so a subject expert or a compliance reader can confirm that nothing has shifted in meaning.

The change note. What was done and why, in a page, including any sentence I could not split without risking the meaning and left alone deliberately.

A short rule sheet. Four or five rules drawn from this page that your own writers can apply to the next one, so you are not buying this service repeatedly.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A regional insurance brokerage has a page explaining what its commercial policy covers. It runs to 900 words in nine paragraphs. The average sentence is thirty-eight words. One paragraph is 210 words long and contains, embedded in a single sentence with semicolons, the seven categories of equipment the policy treats differently. The broker cannot change the wording of the coverage descriptions, which come from the insurer.

The pass splits the nine paragraphs into twenty-six. The seven equipment categories become a list of seven items, using the insurer's exact wording for each. The paragraph explaining the deductible is reordered so the amount comes before the conditions rather than after them. Three sentences are left untouched because splitting them would have separated a qualifier from the thing it qualified, and the change note says so. The page is still 900 words and every technical term in it is the one the insurer uses. It now takes about half the effort to get through, and the brokerage's compliance officer signs it off in ten minutes because the comparison document shows nothing was reworded.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which pages, who reads them, and what is fixed and cannot be touched. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The pages, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The constraints list. You tell me which words, claims or phrases are locked. One working day, and it saves an argument later.
4. The pass. One to two working days per page of ordinary length. Longer pages and regulated pages take more.
5. Review. You and any subject expert check the comparison document. One round of changes.
6. Delivery. The revised page, the comparison, the change note and the rule sheet.

A single page is usually a week. A set of ten pages takes two to three weeks, with the constraints agreed once for all of them.

What it costs

Readability improvement is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, since the work scales with the length and the constraints rather than with anything I can guess in advance. What moves the number is how many pages there are, how long and how dense each one is, and whether a compliance or technical reviewer has to approve the result. A set of pages is priced per page. The pricing page explains the four ways of working, and the figure is fixed in writing before the work starts.

What happens next

Most people who buy this for one page discover the same problem on twenty more, and a content audit puts those in order of need instead of guessing. If the pass makes it obvious that the words themselves are the barrier rather than the sentences, the next step is a plain-language rewrite of the same page. And if your own team is writing the new pages, the rule sheet does more when someone works through it with them, which is coaching your in-house writer. The pass is finished work on its own, and none of that follows automatically.