Writing Levels
It’s important to write for your audience and not for you. When writing training materials (e.g. participant manuals, hand outs, slides, etc.), we should do our best to make it understandable and easy to consume. I’ve had the privilege of working with some very intelligent individuals who were amazing writers. They were eloquent and could always come up with a simple way to explain something. However, some of them struggled with making their writing consumable by their audience. Sometimes they’d use larger words than what was necessary because “it’s the right word to use” or they wanted to write more creatively than technically.
I’m not criticising their writing ability in any way. They were gifted individuals and I only hope to get close to their levels. But there is also a time and place for flourish and creativity in writing. When writing training content, it doesn’t always work.
You may be wondering what this has to do with a job or task analysis. Well it has to do with knowing your audience. It’s a part of knowing who your learners are and understanding their educational levels and what kind of writing they can work with. It may be an audience of doctors, medical professionals, and experts which means you can likely write at a slightly higher level using larger words because they are more common for those professions. Or, it may be an audience of retail cashiers who are either in high school or have a high school diploma. You may choose to simplify the writing or write at a high school level to ensure they can quickly consume the information.
Please don’t take this to mean I think one group is smart and one is dumb. Far from it. I love Albert Einstein’s quote, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” I’m not making a judgement of smart or not smart. It’s more a judgement of where my learners may be and being able to meet them there. Even newspapers and magazines write for an 8-10 grade level of reading. Does this mean they feel their readers are not college educated or dumb? Of course not. They write to those levels to help speed up the reader’s ability to consume the information. Even highly educated people can consume 6th grade materials faster than 15th grade.
When writing, I recommend you use a readability calculator to determine what level you are writing. This writing here is at grade 7.5 (using Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level). Most word processing programs offer a readability statistics in the spelling and grammar checking or if you do a Google search for “readability calculators” you’ll see a few free options to pick from.