I’m starting to work as an ease-of-reading specialist at Selkokeskus.
The principles they advocate are like those I teach to public-sector writers. A specialist will analyze the perspective from which an article is written, the familiarity of its vocabulary, and the difficulty of its structure. Those three levels are key to readability.
But how can you maintain the reader’s motivation? It’s tempting for a poor reader to give up and not read the text through. So a supportive writer places hooks throughout the text to encourage the reader to continue.
Text that’s easy to read doesn’t overload working memory. Sentences and paragraphs are shorter, and the overall length of the piece looks manageable. The main topic appears near the beginning in case the reader doesn’t persist to the end.
Poor readers have limited experience with different types of writing. As a result they can have trouble distinguishing between news, opinion, and humor. One technique is to clearly mark each genre, even using different layout or background to separate a report from a casual piece. From the point of interpretation, the difference is essential.
Other layout tools also facilitate ease of reading. Larger fonts and shorter line lengths reduce barriers to the reader. The font size may be slightly larger than usual and the line shorter: a good length is 58 characters with spaces. As for images, they should be clear and informative; easy-to-read does not mean “show your cleverness.”
This format also works well for work-related writing and for items posted online. People rarely complain that something was too readable.