Submitted by Tom Vradenburg on July 25, 2023, at 8:57
I worked on those International Adult Literacy Survey reports Marie-Claude mentions.
I am not sure that ratcheting everything 'down' to a Grade 8 reading level is the answer: see Gael Spivak's blog posts here on this topic. But the general point is that we, as public servants, can never, ever assume that "it makes sense to me, so it will make sense to them." The only real way to find out what makes sense to your reader is testing with a representative portion of the audience. That's not always feasible; that's why we seem to default to this "make it all Grade 8" position.
There's no easy answer to all this, but our first step, as content writers, is to understand what user experience people say: "You are not your user." We cannot stress this enough.
I am not sure that ratcheting everything 'down' to a Grade 8 reading level is the answer: see Gael Spivak's blog posts here on this topic. But the general point is that we, as public servants, can never, ever assume that "it makes sense to me, so it will make sense to them." The only real way to find out what makes sense to your reader is testing with a representative portion of the audience. That's not always feasible; that's why we seem to default to this "make it all Grade 8" position.
There's no easy answer to all this, but our first step, as content writers, is to understand what user experience people say: "You are not your user." We cannot stress this enough.