How Difficult to Understand Your Blog?
Filed in: Reviews, Web — June 17th, 2008
Guest blogging by AhTim. If you like this entry, subscribe my feed for more updates.
Are you sure your readers understand what you write? How difficult it is to understand your blog? I know some blogger might show off their bombastic English in their article. But what is the point when only few people can fully understand his/her writing? Normally, I will just scroll through these articles…
So, how to make sure your blog is easy to read, easy to understand? Keep on follow these 2 rules:
- Simple Words
- Simple Sentence
Do not ever use complicated sentence. The longer the sentence, the more mistakes you will make. Then readers might be confused or misunderstood your actual meaning.
Test Your Blog Readability
Want to test your blog readability? Well, you can get someone to proof read your blog to get some comment. If not, you can use The Blog Readability tool to test.
The tool is similar to how much is your blog worth tool. No installation needed. Just launch The Blog Readability site, enter your blog’s URL and click on “Check readability Now”.
Once done, the result will prompt your blog’s readability level. It has level range from elementary school to genius. So, do not so happy when you get a genius readability level. Your reader might not understand what you write. 
My two cents
Anyway, the test tool is just for reference and fun. It is not 100% fully proven on its algorithm. Do more interaction with your readers, you will know whether they understand via comments.
I have tested my blog. I have the blog’s reading level of “Junior High School”. LiewCF tech blog having same readability with me! I believe with my simple English (so called layman term), you should understood what I write. Am I right? 
Popularity: 2% [?]
Tags: blog readability, english, writing skills
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June 17th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
haha mine is “elementary school”. either my english is too kiddish or my writing is really so easy to read :p
June 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Mine is “High School”. Still okay considering I have many tech related stuffs and how-tos in my blog.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
My blog is still new. but I got “Elementary school” level for it. and that should be ok with my English level..lol.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
my site got “genius level” lol
June 17th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
[...] level? Mine is "Elementary school" level. Where did I get this level? As I surf to liewCf’s blog, his current entry are about this site. Enter your blog URL and check your blog readability level. [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
@artakus: Are you an English teacher? lol
June 17th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Mine “junior high” too. I found Paul Tan in “college” and Joel Neoh in “high school”
June 17th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
“We were unable to check the URL you entered.”
This is what I got after typing in my Blog URL. So sad.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
OMG!! I got “Genius Level”!! What I can do right now?? I think the word I am using is quite simple and honestly my english is that good actually.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Erm.. says mine is High School. Hopefully that’s because I have a tech blog and many of the terms used arent english words (eg. Feedburner).
I really dont think my blog is that hard to read though.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Simple English, Easy to understand! Most important you deliver the “message” and “solve” the readers problems. Of course you also profit from blogging!
Great! Win-win situation!
June 18th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Many blog posts are full of fluffs. Just like a big burger full of potatoes and with little meat.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
junior high school readibility scale … so need no genius to understand my blog hehe…
June 18th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
@Sheng Loong: I think you have entered URL wrongly. Just need to put in your .com without “http”.
@Greentac: That means your English is too good.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:00 am
great tool,thank for sharing~
June 19th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Writing an article really need some skill eh?
June 19th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Ok, i got junior high school,,,, hehehe
June 19th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Sheng Loong: Your URL is working fine. Since I had read your latest post I’m going to earn $10 millions in the next 10 years.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Liew: I love reading your blog but not many posts lately.
24-05-2008 LiewCF.com is Accepted in 9rules Network!
31-05-2008 Thanks to sponsors of the month (May 2008)
11-06-2008 LiewCF is NOT Missing in Hong Kong
12-06-2008 Download Full Yahoo! Messenger Standalone Installer
17-06-2008 How Difficult to Understand Your Blog?
Busy with that chick, other projects, etc.
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:36 pm
i myself sure have fun with this tools. hehehe. mine a genius blog. hahahaha. although most of the things i wrote in my blog are mostly craps
June 24th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
i get a genius as well…but i am worry isi it because of my grammar..
so those who understand was called genius..
hahahaha
June 25th, 2008 at 8:30 am
why I can’t access your blog for the past…I think…3 days? Your blog were having problem or it is just my Firefox3 can’t open it? But in IE7 it’s just the same.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:15 am
@aizal: ya, my other friend told me too. I hope it has been fixed for you now?
June 26th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Hahahaha! I really love the Blog Readability Test! It actually works on normal websites too. I tried putting in my university’s website and it said “College (Undergrad) Level”. Makes perfect sense eh? ^_~
June 26th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Congrats for being accepted as 9rules members. Hope to see more updates from you in the future.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:29 am
[...] read about this blog readability test in LiewCF’s blog.The test will give you a conclusion about how difficult/easy your content of the blog to be [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
i myself sure have fun with this tools. hehehe. mine a genius blog. hahahaha. although most of the things i wrote in my blog are mostly craps
June 29th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
->Liew, Maybe there are too many ads at your blog. Hehe.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:21 am
well, i’m a new blogger and i got ‘junior high school’ level as well. I agree with AhTim on using plain simple english. Nobody wants to read white paper english on a blog. Besides, most blogs provide unofficial information hence should not need to be worded like a uni dissertation paper.
anyway, my two cents on the blog readability tool is that most malaysian blogs won’t get high ratings simply because many of us choose to localise our blogs for local folks by inserting some manglish every now and then. then again, nobody knows the algorithm or criteria in which the tool processes and determines the readability level.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 am
Liew – Do you mean that we shouldn’t use long, stretched sentences to get a message or a point across to the readers which whom we are trying to induce to visit our site regularly and, hopefully, increase our site traffic so that we can have a higher page ranking and therefore become famous.
Oh.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Hey! I got “Elementary School”.. yahoo! Er? Am I elementary? No la!
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:21 am
@MorganLighter: this post is written by guest blogger, not me. But I do agree to use simple sentences in blog entries.
You can use a few simple sentences to get a message to your readers, instead of a single loooong sentence. Not everyone can get the message in a looong sentence.
personally, I like the KISS principle.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Wow, you have guest blogger. I also like to read AH TIM blogs.
It is really good to write simple english so that more people can read. Can I
July 6th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
ask you a question. Is my blogs too simple to read?
Have a nice day.
July 7th, 2008 at 10:28 am
interesting. i doubt the blog readability tool, but using simple words and sentences is definitely helpful…
July 7th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
coolingstar9.. nice blog!
July 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
hmmm… i got ‘genius level’ … maybe because of the content are in Malay…
anyway, this is cool stuff.. thanx for sharing
July 9th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
This is a great tip for all those bloggers out there. Sentence construction is indeed one of the most common difficulties a blogger experiences (whether he’s an English speaker or not). In this act, you really need to consider a lot of factors such as grammar, spelling and appropriate words to be used.
But I’m not saying blogging is a hell of a difficult job. In fact, it’s fun!
July 13th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Yes, blog should be using simple English so that the readers could understand easily. But even more important is the navigation of the blogs and the other links available. It must be properly arrange so that visitors could find what they want to find. Blogging for money…