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Hello Spark reader,

Financial markets are complex, and financial marketing tends to reflect that…but it’s our job to parse the complexity into content that audiences can easily engage with.

This week, we’re delighted to feature a brief masterclass in how to write readably from comms expert David Butcher.

Since 2019, David’s annual Readability Report has charted just how readable financial content really is. It’s a great resource for any financial marketer and indeed anyone who wants to engage and persuade. Something tells me that’s just about all of us.

Enjoy,

—joel

Why your writing is hard to read – and how to fix it

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I Write is a useful guide for content writers:

Orwell doesn’t mention readability – we use the word more in 2026 than 1946 – but he might as well have. 

Readability is a simple measure of how easy something is to read. It’s a metric of short words and short sentences. A low score is good – a high one bad. If you want people to read on these days, you must be readable. 

For example, this article has a decent score of 9.2. A teenager would understand it. Or, more likely, that 45-year-old you want to influence, who’s tired, stressed and reading it on the train home.

They don’t need this extract from a 16.1-scoring investment blog:

You probably came across similar purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug earlier today.

Hard reading

We’ve got finite capacity for information. Miller’s Law says human working memory has room for seven items, plus or minus two. You can probably find research with other numbers and none of them is infinity.

If your content asks readers to remember seven things, you’ve probably hit their limit. And you’d better hope they read nothing else that day.

Hope is what you have in our attention economy. In 2004, experts measured how long people focused on a task before getting distracted. The answer? Two-and-a-half minutes. That’s since fallen to 47 seconds.

Today, adult Americans spend just 16 minutes a day reading for pleasure. That number has also been falling and may continue to do so.

We say reading. What we really mean is scanning. We all know we’re content rich and time poor. It’s an impossible equation – so, instead of reading online content linearly like we used to, we scan for what we need. We’re like honeybees: we dwell on a point briefly, get what we need, then buzz to the next.

If that wasn’t bad enough, 57% of us online scanners can’t be bothered to scroll to the second screen. The attrition rate is brutal. Few get to the end.

A reading fixation

If these habits are new, the science of reading is age old.

When we look at words on a screen or page, our eyes perform fixations. That’s a snapshot of 7 to 9 characters, lasting a quarter of a second, enabling our brain to comprehend the words. You probably used 12 fixations on that last sentence. This sentence needs 3.

Then your eye literally goes blind while it jumps to the next fixation. Longer words eat up more of a fixation, take 2 or 3 fixations, or demand a regression, where you go back and re-read something. This chews up energy and time.

How to be readable

Writing readably requires 3 things. 

1. Choose shorter words

Lean into the science – and behavioural science – of reading. Asking readers to perform as few fixations as possible. Write with concise and precise words.

It’s often said English consists mainly of short words. There will almost always be a better, briefer word to express what you want to say. 

Yes, long and complex words are available. But, as the brilliant paper Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly concludes: “Write clearly and simply if you can, and you’ll be more likely to be thought of as intelligent.”

The thesaurus is your friend.

2. Create shorter sentences

Corporate content writers tend to use commas too much, believing that, as their thinking evolves, the reader will accept that evolution, and be happy to read long sentences, full of excessive information, where commas, liberally applied, almost start appearing at random, extending average sentence length, and having the effect of making what started as a sharp piece of thinking descend into meaningless oblivion, and then they feel they don’t have time to edit what they’ve written. Sorry, what was the point again?

There’s another way. It requires short sentences. It’s hard work but always worth it. Readers will recognise your effort to create simplicity. They’ll reward you by reading on.

The average written English sentence length is about 14 words. Bigwigs at Oxford University and the UK Government ask their content creators to stay within 25 words. You could do a lot worse than remembering these numbers.

3. Write shorter articles

Word count might not contribute to numeric readability scores but we all value brevity, don’t we?

So, you decide what’s best for your readers – mindful of their time, capacity and energy constraints.

There are plenty of guidelines. For instance, the Associated Press in 2014 required reporters to aim for 300-500 words, saying, “We are failing to exercise important news judgment when our stories are overlong and not tightly edited.” 

Wise words. 

There’s plenty of advice out there. One is specifically designed for corporate content creators: The Readability Report. 

When I led communications for large financial institutions, I needed a snappy, empirical report, to help me win arguments about clear and simple communications. But there wasn’t one.

So that’s why I created the annual Readability Report. It measures a universe of financial content –leavening the story with the latest or most noteworthy academic evidence. You can download the latest edition for free here or just get in touch.

David Butcher is a communications expert helping organisations to tell their story with imagination and energy – contributing to commercial success. He has 30 years of experience in PR consultancies, blue chip financial services firms and, for the last eight years, running a consultancy. He has a brace of history degrees, reads a lot, is a Fellow of the RSA in London.

Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Send us your shout-outs and strong opinions to include in next week’s edition at [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace, a global B2B creative studio and consultancy that helps businesses drive meaningful brand and commercial impact. Get in touch if you’d like to chat with any of the team. Have a great week ahead.