Research

Reading levels in our own help pages.

We read our support articles the way a first-time customer does, then scored how hard they were. Some were working against the people they were meant to help.

The short version

What the scores told us.

We measured every support article for reading age, the rough number of school years a page assumes you have had. About a third read harder than the topic needed. We rewrote those, and the questions about them dropped.

Field notes

The page that tested us.

A help article about connecting a domain kept coming back as a support ticket. Every step in it was correct. People still could not follow it.

Imagery in production

The domain-setup article was the first one we rewrote.

The article had everything right. Every step was accurate, every screen was named, every button sat where we said it would. Customers read it, then wrote in anyway. That is a strange thing to watch, and it sent us looking at the writing instead of the steps.

So we scored the whole library. Not for tone or spelling, but for reading age: how many years of schooling a page quietly assumes before it makes sense. A page can be correct and still ask too much.

What we found

About a third of our articles read harder than the thing they explained. Sentences carried two or three ideas at once. Words came from the manual, not from a phone call. Steps sat folded inside paragraphs instead of laid out one to a line.

Long sentences doing the work of three short ones
Words we would never say out loud to a customer
Instructions buried inside explanation

What happened next

We rewrote the hard ones and left the rest alone. The domain article turned into short lines and plain words. The tickets about it slowed to a trickle. We added no new information. We just took the reader's side.

Closer look

Same fact, fewer hurdles.

Here is one line from the domain article, before and after. Nothing was left out. It only got easier to act on. Before: "Prior to propagation completing, DNS resolution may be intermittent across regional resolvers." After: "Your new address can take a few hours to work everywhere. That is normal."

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One line, rewritten. The fact is identical.

Under the hood

How we scored it.

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What reading age actually measures

It is not about being clever. It is about how much effort a page asks for.

Reading age is a rough estimate of how many years of schooling a page assumes. It climbs when sentences get long and words get rare. It has nothing to do with how smart the reader is, and everything to do with how much work the writer left on the page. A high score is not an insult to anyone. It is a sign we made someone translate before they could act.

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How we ran the numbers

Every article, one pass, the same yardstick.

We ran every published article through the same readability check, then read the hardest ones by hand to be sure the score matched the feeling. A number is a starting point, not a verdict. A page can score badly and still be fine, or score well and still confuse people. The human read settled the close calls. We kept the list ranked from hardest to easiest and worked our way down it.

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What we changed, and what we did not

Plainer words, shorter lines, the same facts.

We shortened sentences so each one carried a single idea. We swapped words from the manual for the words we use on the phone. We pulled steps out of paragraphs and gave each one its own line. We changed no facts. Nothing was dumbed down and nothing was removed. If anything the rewrites say more, because a reader who follows the first time does not need the paragraph that repeats it.

“If a help page needs reading twice, that is our mistake to fix, not the reader's problem to solve.”

Our writing standard

What it changed

Better for readers, and for us.

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For the reader

Fewer pages that end in a phone call

When an article reads at the level of the task, people finish it and move on. The topics we rewrote sent fewer questions to support, which is the whole point of a help page.

Ask us anything

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For the desk

A rule we now write to

Every new article gets scored before it goes live. If it reads harder than the task, it goes back for another pass. The check is part of writing now, not a cleanup we do once a year.

Asked and answered.

Does a lower reading level mean less detail?

No. We kept every fact. Shorter sentences and plainer words carry the same information with less effort, and they leave room to say more, not less.

Is this just simplifying for the sake of it?

It is matching the writing to the task. A guide for setting up a printer should not read like a legal notice. Where a topic is genuinely technical, the page stays technical. We only cut the difficulty that was not doing any work.

Do you score new articles too?

Yes. Every new help page is checked before it goes live. If it reads harder than the thing it explains, it goes back for another draft.

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