Readability

Written by Jim Chaput
After a 19-year career in financial services, Jim left a leadership position to focus on health and fitness. Jim is a Master Practitioner of Applied Movement Neurology and holds Certificates in Applied Functional Science and 3DMAPS from the Gray Institute. His passion is empowering people to help resolve the pain, tension and insomnia that prevents them from living well.

Managing reader expectations is one of the ways to make things more readable. Ignoring expectations is a sure way to be ignored or misunderstood.

How do you feel when an article, comment or email covers the page without any breaks? A giant paragraph looks exhausting and you probably don’t want to read it. Breaking it into chunks makes it digestible.

What about long FB posts where each sentence is a paragraph? I see it a lot lately with marketing posts, so now it seems scammy. Unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, keep connected thoughts in one paragraph (of reasonable length).

You get to the end of a sentence, then need go back to re-read it to understand the point. Did the author communicate effectively? Keep your sentences as simple as possible, but no simpler.

These are some of the things I keep in mind when I write. What do you do to help your readers understand you?

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