Ninety-three per cent of respondents do not try to measure the reading age of their scheme communications, an audience poll at the PLSA annual conference has found.

Commenting on the result, Capital Cranfield client director Andy Cheseldine said: “I'm guessing that [schemes] think [testing readability age of scheme communications] is a really complex thing to do and expensive. It isn't.”

Scheme communications can be measured using the Campaign for Plain English's metrics, “but that can be quite expensive”, Cheseldine warned.

A cheaper option to measure the reading age of scheme communications is to use a Microsoft Word function, he recommended.

“In Word, if you go into options, then proofing, there's a little box to tick that says show readability statistics. Copy your comms into Word, tick that box, go through spell check, and voilà. It takes 30 seconds,” Cheseldine said.

This provides a summary of the average number of words in the document's sentences and provides Flesch-Kincaid readability metrics.

“So for example, a Flesch-Kincaid score of 34.8 actually means about 20 per cent of people can read that document, or the same reading level as a graduate. NEST famously aims its communications at people with a reading age of 12 or below,” he explained.

The reading age of a document can be easily reduced by using shorter sentences to make them easier to understand, Cheseldine recommended.

He added: “By improving your communications by increasing readability you have immediately added value as a scheme.”

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