Kickass Tool for Content Writers
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I have been a writer for a long time. I have done a lot of writing. Many excellent teachers, professors, bosses, colleagues, and editors have helped me. I've responded to a lot of red ink - a lot of red ink.
A few days ago, I found a tool that has been extremely helpful. It has significantly improved the clarity of my writing. Using it on a piece of work makes me more confident about it at publication time. It requires a lot of work to use (at least it does for me) but the results are well worth the time.
People who are serious about writing well will understand this tool immediately.
I don't own this website (I wish I did) and have no affiliation with it. Today they released a desktop version that they are almost giving away. I have not tried it yet but plan to instal it today.
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+1 for Hemingway App! I also like Scribe for similar reasons, but Scribe isn't free (or nearly free).
I didn't know about the desktop version, EGOL, and will definitely check that out. Thanks for sharing!
Christy

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I just found out that they have a desktop version that can export your document as html.
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Great find. Just looking at it now.
Just curious, but does Google take into account readability like this?
Thanks
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does Google take into account readability like this?
Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how they use readability.
Here is what I do and believe. This is opinion.
I write a lot of content about subjects that could be read by people with a wide range of reading levels and expertise.
Let's say the topic is diamond jewelry. Documents could be written that fit into any of these categories....
** containing words like "sparkling".... "glittering".... "pretty"... "fire".. are probably written by and written for the average consumer - someone who does not know the language of the subject - someone who uses common and easy words (fourth grade)
** containing words like "clarity"... "facets"... "setting".... "18 karat"... are probably written by and for an educated consumer who definitely knows the basic language of the retail marketplace (10th grade)
** containing words like "dispersion"... "loupe"... "grading"... are probably written by someone with basic knowledge of diamond gemology, maybe a retail sales person with experience (13th grade)
** containing words like "fluorescence"... "refractive index"... are not consumer words but those of a specialist or researcher (16th grade)
Each one of these documents has higher grade level words. Google can probably tell by the words used in the query, the searchers previous reading, what level of information they can't handle. They could give the inexperienced consumer easy information and filter much of that information from the researcher.
Not all subjects have this wide of a grade level stratification but some subjects do.
When I write an article that might be read by people with a broad range of expertise on a topic. I make sure that the first couple of paragraphs are extremely readable. These lead paragraphs should contain "the first info that anyone searching for the topic should read". I will spend a lot of time making those first few paragraphs basic and easy. Then present a bit higher level content next, and the most difficult towards the end of the article.
This keeps the basic reader from bouncing and the more advanced reader, who probably has been on my site before, knows that the advanced info is probably there, just scroll down and look at the topic headings.
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That's a good question, and I'd like an answer too. I have noticed that when I run Yoast, SEO on my blog posts, it does score them according to Flesch Reading Ease and recommends making them easier to read for SEO purposes.
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Perhaps the easiest way to lower the reading level of a document is to look at single sentences. Most of then labeled "difficult to read" or "very difficult to read" will have one of these....
A) sentences with two separate ideas
B) sentences with two difficult words
Break those into two simpler sentences and the reading level will go down.
If you lower the reading level of your document then a greater percentage of the people who enter that webpage will "get it". The power of this is that you can double the intellectual conversion rate of your document for all of the traffic that enters it for years. Having done that it will be shared more, linked more, bounced less, scrolled farther... and that can double or triple the intellectual conversion rate yet again.
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You do not ever need to position the same NAP on 2 nearby commercial enterprise websites. You will simply further harm the original penalized website if you try this, and, you may simultaneously be tying the brand new internet site to a penalized entity.