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Benchmark readability against The Huffington Post

Make your message as readable as this popular news site

How does your message stand up against The Huffington Post?

Read all over How does your readability stand up against the third most popular online news site? Benchmark your message to find out. Image by GaryPhoto

After all, The Huffington Post is the third most popular online news site, behind only Yahoo! News and Google News. They must be doing something right!

So what readability techniques can you steal from the Huff Post?

Is your message difficult to read?

To find out, we analyzed a full day’s content in the Huff Post — some 85 articles in all, not including the sports section. Here’s what we found:

  • Story length. The Huffington Post’s articles weigh in at an average of 752 words. How long is your average blog post, news release or intranet article?
  • Paragraph length. The Huffington Post’s paragraphs average a slender 34 words. Long paragraphs reduce reading. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read.
  • Sentence length. The Huffington Post’s average sentence length is 20 words. Short sentences promote comprehension. What’s the average number of words per sentence in your message?
  • Word length. The Huffington Post averages a little over 6 characters per word. Plain English reduces reading effort and increases reading. How many syllables per word do you average in your messages?
  • Flesch Reading Ease score. The Huffington Post averages about 50 on The Flesch Reading Ease test. This readability formula measures how easy to read a piece of text is. The higher, the better, on this scale of 0 to 100.

Get the rest of the numbers. >>>

How long should your message be?

Would your message be twice as good if it were half as long?

Yes, the research says. The shorter your message, the more likely readers are to read it, understand it and make good decisions based on it.

Rev Up Readability — our clear-writing workshop, which starts June 20So how long is too long? What’s the right length for your piece? Your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words?

Find out at Rev Up Readability — our clear-writing workshop, which starts June 20.

There, you’ll use a cool (free!) tool to analyze your message for 27 readability metrics. You’ll leave with quantifiable targets, tips and techniques for measurably boosting readability.

Save up to $100 with our group discounts.

Register for Rev Up Readability — our clear-writing workshop, which starts June 20