Writing readable posts for X

A readable post is one a person can take in on the first pass, without going back to the start of a sentence to work out what it was about. On X that pass is short. Most people read on a phone, thumb hovering, deciding in a second or two whether to stop. If the post needs a second read, many of them won't give it one.

You can't make every idea simple, but you can make most sentences easier to follow. The techniques are old and dull, and they work.

Shorter sentences first

Sentence length is the biggest single lever. A sentence of 12 words is easy. A sentence of 30 words, with a clause tucked in the middle, asks the reader to hold the start in memory while they wait for the verb.

Look for the joints in a long sentence: "and", "but", "which", "because", a semicolon. Most of them are places where you can stop and start again.

Before: We've updated the app so that if you were seeing the login loop that some people on older Android versions reported last week, you should now be able to sign in normally.

After: The login loop on older Android phones is fixed. Update the app and you should be able to sign in normally.

The second version is the same length in characters and much easier to read. It also puts the news first.

Common words over impressive ones

The second lever is word length, or more exactly the number of syllables. "Use" beats "utilize". "Help" beats "facilitate". "Start" beats "commence". Long words are not wrong, and sometimes there is no short one (you can't swap "vaccination" for something shorter without losing meaning). The goal is to stop using long words where short ones do the same job.

A quick pass that catches most of them:

• Replace nouns made from verbs. "Make a decision" becomes "decide". "Provide an update" becomes "update".
• Cut "in order to". "To" is enough.
• Swap jargon your readers might not share. If you have to use a term, use it once and make the context explain it.

One idea per post

A post that tries to announce a feature, thank a partner and ask for feedback is three posts squeezed into one. Readers pick up the first idea and miss the others. If all three matter, post them separately or use a thread with one idea in each post.

A good test is to describe the post to a colleague in one short sentence. If you need "and" twice, there are probably two posts in there.

Put the point where the eye lands

Most people scan. In Jakob Nielsen's well-known 1997 study of web reading, 79% of test users scanned new pages and only 16% read word by word. Scanning readers pick up the start of a line and the start of a block of text, and a phone screen makes that habit stronger. Put the news, the change or the question first. Context and caveats can follow.

That also means cutting the warm-up. Openers like "So, we've been thinking a lot about..." spend the most valuable part of the post on nothing.

How to use the reading grade

The meter's grade is the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. It was derived in 1975 for the US Navy, which wanted to check that training manuals matched the reading skills of enlisted personnel. The formula combines two numbers: the average words per sentence, and the average syllables per word. The result is roughly the US school grade a reader needs to follow the text easily.

Use the grade as a pointer to a problem, and fix the problem directly. If a post comes back at grade 13, find the longest sentence and split it, or find the longest word and see if it can go. Then look at the post again. Rewriting purely to push the number down produces choppy text that is technically easy and tiring to read.

Two limits are worth knowing. The formula counts syllables, not meaning, so "the cat sat on the mat" and a short sentence full of unfamiliar terms can score the same. And on very short text the score is unstable, which is why the meter waits for at least a dozen words before it colors the dial.

Formatting that helps on a phone

Line breaks are cheap (one character each) and they make a longer post far easier to scan. A post of 250 characters as one block looks like a wall on a phone. The same text in three short paragraphs looks like three quick reads.

Some habits that help:

• Break after the first sentence if it carries the news.
• Keep lists to a few items, one per line.
• Avoid styled "bold" or "italic" letters copied from Unicode generators. They count double toward the limit, and many screen readers can't read them.
• Write numbers as digits. "3 changes" scans faster than "three changes" in a feed.

A short checklist before posting

Run through these with the draft in the meter:

1. Is the main point in the first sentence?
2. Is any sentence longer than about 20 words? Split it.
3. Are there words with an obvious shorter twin?
4. Is there more than one idea? Consider a second post.
5. Does the grade sit somewhere around 8 or below? If not, find out which sentence is pulling it up.
6. Would it still make sense to someone who sees only this post, without the thread or conversation around it?

Experts read plain sentences faster too, and they are the readers most likely to notice when a post wastes their time.

Questions

Twittermeter is independent and not affiliated with X Corp. X changes its limits and features from time to time. If something here doesn't match what you see in the app, X's help center has the final word.