How to Improve Text: Ways to Avoid Confusing Your Audience

If you’re responsible for creating help or training content, content clarity is key. You know you’re trying to achieve something very specific with your writing: You want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to understand and recall the information. The idea is that they should then be able to apply what they’ve learned to any number of tasks.

Sounds easy enough, but it doesn’t always work that way. After all, who hasn’t come across a manual or a set of directions like the one below? Not only is it convoluted and full of jargon, the relatively easy task it describes becomes confusing and difficult to perform.

Let’s have a closer look at signs of unclear content. We’ve already named a few, but there’s more.

How do you know if your content is unclear?

Here are 4 signs your content might be unclear:

1. Sentences are too long or complex: It’s as simple as that – sentence length most often correlates with clarity. The longer a sentence is, the harder it is for readers to follow it from start to finish. Also, long sentences are often prone to complex grammatical structures, which are hard to process. 
2. Inconsistent terminology: Audit your own content and ask yourself whether you’re using the same terms for the same things throughout your content. Terminological inconsistency confuses your readers, so make it one of your top priorities when crafting compelling and clear content.
3. Frequent questions from your audience: To track this sign of unclear content, you need to talk with your support and customer service colleagues.
   Example: Does your organization receive a high number of product usage questions, or are your customers asking some questions repeatedly? This could be a hint that you might want to have a look at the clarity of your product documentation, because missing clarity can lead to misunderstanding, product misuse and open questions. 
4. Low engagement or conversions: Low engagement and conversion rates can have multiple reasons and therefore they need to be analyzed thoroughly. Unclear content can be the literal root of the problem, while short, clear messaging often has a positive effect on engagement and conversions.

Tips to improve text clarity

Clarity is important for any content you create, especially when it’s designed to help or educate an audience. It’s critical that both you and your audience understand the content you’ve written.

To help with content clarity, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Always explain any terminology you use that isn’t common knowledge. Also, if there’s a way to communicate the same idea without using jargon, that’s probably the better way to go. Remember, the goal is to make your content as easy to understand and retain as possible.
2. If you’re using acronyms, make sure that you always spell them out on first reference. This will benefit anyone who’s not familiar with them.
3. Streamline your writing by using simpler words and shorter sentences and paragraphs. To do so, you’ll have to edit your content diligently, removing all of the excess verbiage that you don’t actually need.
4. Make the content easy to scan by using headings and bulleted lists. This will help direct readers to key points and break up the monotony of long passages of text. For longer documents, consider also including a table of contents to give readers an overview of the content in a single glance.
5. Write in an active voice. Assigning an actor to every action will help make your writing much clearer by eliminating ambiguity and clearly designating who is performing each activity.

By following tips like these, you’ll be able to write help and training content that’s easier for people to understand and learn from. As with any kind of writing, it’s a skill you can develop over time with a lot of practice.

Using an AI text improver

By using AI text improvers, you can make your content clearer and more effective. But be aware of the fact that not every AI text improver is made for enterprise use. 

As a professional enterprise writer, choose a solution that is meant for enterprise use, providing safety and scalability. Also, you probably not only want to check your content for clarity, but also make sure it meets your organization’s writing standards and compliance requirements. If so, consider content governance software like Acrolinx as your go-to-solution.