RESEARCH
The Honeymoon’s over
Investment content readability fails
The Readability Report tells you how easy investment content is to read.
Readability is essential in modern communications. Your clients are busy, distracted and probably tired. You have an obligation to ensure they can find and comprehend your key points. You have an obligation to engender trust. You must be readable.
We’ve measured investment industry thought leadership since 2019 and it’s almost always too complex for the audiences it’s aimed at.
This is because corporate content employs too many words and too many long words – when shorter, more readable language will do. We lay this bare in simple, stark data.
Our Readability Reports rank companies by readability score, they measure the readability of AI investment content, they highlight the good, the bad and the ugly, and much more.
Moreover, Readability Reports are full of academic research, facts and advice to help improve your communications and your ability to win arguments about readability with clients or colleagues.
Our Readability Reports are some of the most readable documents you’ll see all year. Download your free copy now.
Readability is a simple measure of how easy a piece of text is to read. The investment industry consistently publishes complex, wordy and hard-to-read material. We demonstrate what’s wrong with this approach, why readability matters, and how to accomplish it.
You need to make your key points as simple and accessible as possible. This means language that elucidates – rather than obfuscates. And it means a layout that prioritises the ideas, not the waffle.
Readable content and thought leadership requires short words and short sentences. We also argue for short articles. This is based on all the available research into attention spans, the science of reading, and how people read and comprehend in the modern world – where they read no more than 28% of words on a page.
AI can create passable writing. Readability Report analysis says it’s harder to read than human-generated material. This is because AI is illiterate. It has no idea what the words actually mean. It delves into a pot of mediocre content and provides you, the user, with mediocrity. We believe your readers deserve better.
When AI bots respond to search requests, they seek simple, verifiable and readable material. The simpler and more authoritative your writing, the more likely AI search will be to present it as the answer to a query.
Being readable and dumbing down are two different things. Using simple language to describe an idea means you are making it accessible to a busy reader. Academic research confirms that they are more likely to think highly of you for using simplicity. Dumbing down is where you change the idea itself to fit a preconceived idea of your audience. (edited)
