Your Content Is Too Hard to Read: A Diagnosis-and-Fix Checklist

You spent three hours on that blog post. You researched, outlined, drafted, revised. You published it. And then — crickets. Low time-on-page, high bounce rate, zero shares.

Here's a possibility that's uncomfortable to consider: the writing itself is the problem. Not the topic. Not the title. The prose is simply too hard to get through.

This isn't a character flaw. It's a correctable craft problem. Most readability issues come from a small set of repeating habits — habits that are invisible to the writer because you already know what you meant to say. The reader doesn't have that advantage.

Work through this checklist before you hit publish. Each item names the problem, shows you how to spot it, and tells you exactly what to do about it.

The Checklist

☐ 1. Your Average Sentence Length Is Over 20 Words

What's going wrong: Long sentences demand that readers hold multiple clauses in working memory while they wait for the main point to land. By the time they reach the period, they've often lost the thread — or they've quietly given up and started skimming.

How to diagnose it: Paste your draft into Hemingway Editor (free, browser-based). It highlights sentences in yellow (long) and red (very long). If you're seeing more than one red sentence per paragraph, you have a problem. Alternatively, check your Flesch-Kincaid grade level in Microsoft Word under Review → Readability Statistics. Aim for grade 7–9 for general audiences.

The fix: Find your longest sentence and ask: what is the one thing this sentence is trying to say? Say only that. Move everything else to its own sentence. You'll notice that splitting rarely loses meaning — it almost always clarifies it. Target an average of 14–17 words per sentence for blog content.

☐ 2. You're Using Jargon Your Reader Doesn't Already Own

What's going wrong: Jargon isn't inherently bad — it's efficient shorthand within a community that shares it. The mistake is using industry-specific language with an audience that hasn't earned that vocabulary yet. When readers encounter a word they don't recognize, they make a choice: look it up (friction) or skip it (comprehension gap). Most skip it. If this happens often enough, they leave.

How to diagnose it: Read your draft aloud as if explaining it to a smart friend who works in a completely different field. Every time you feel the urge to define something mid-sentence, that's a jargon flag. Tools like the Readable.io grader will also surface complex vocabulary.

The fix: For every piece of jargon, make a binary decision: define it in plain language immediately after you use it, or replace it entirely. "CTR (the percentage of people who click your link after seeing it)" is fine. Just "CTR" when your audience is small business owners who don't live in analytics dashboards? Not fine.

☐ 3. Passive Voice Is Doing Most of Your Heavy Lifting

What's going wrong: "The report was submitted by the team" isn't wrong — it's just sluggish. Passive constructions hide the actor, lengthen the sentence, and create a vague, bureaucratic tone that feels like it's avoiding responsibility. Readers feel this even when they can't name it. The prose becomes slippery — hard to quote, hard to remember.

How to diagnose it: Search your document for "was," "were," "been," "is being," and "have been." These are the fingerprints of passive voice. Hemingway Editor highlights them too. If more than 10% of your sentences are passive, the writing will read as flat.

The fix: Rewrite each passive sentence by putting the actor first. "The team submitted the report." Done. The sentence is shorter, clearer, and more alive. The one exception: use passive deliberately when the actor truly doesn't matter or when you want to emphasize the object. Otherwise, default to active.

☐ 4. Your Paragraphs Run Five Lines or Longer (On Screen)

What's going wrong: A paragraph that looks reasonable in a Word document becomes a wall of gray text on mobile. More than 70% of web readers are on phones. Dense paragraphs create visual friction before the reader has even processed a single word — the eye sees "too much" and the brain sends an avoidance signal.

How to diagnose it: Preview your post on a phone. Actually do this — not in a browser on your laptop, but on the device. If any paragraph runs past four lines on a 390px-wide screen, it's too long.

The fix: Break it. Two-to-three sentence paragraphs are not lazy; they're considerate. Use the line break as punctuation for breathing room. One-sentence paragraphs, used sparingly, create emphasis and rhythm. Like this.

☐ 5. You're Burying the Point Inside Nominalizations

What's going wrong: A nominalization is when you turn a verb into a noun. "We made the decision to conduct an investigation" instead of "We decided to investigate." It sounds more formal. It reads as weaker. Writers do this when they're trying to sound authoritative, but readers experience it as vagueness — the action is smothered under layers of abstraction.

How to diagnose it: Scan for common nominalization endings: -tion, -ment, -ance, -ence, -ity, -al. If you find nouns like "utilization," "implementation," "facilitation," "assessment" — you're nominalizing. Ask: is there a verb hiding in here?

The fix: Unbury it. "The implementation of the strategy" → "implementing the strategy." "We conducted an analysis of" → "we analyzed." Each fix saves two to four words and puts the energy back in the verb where it belongs.

☐ 6. Your Transition Words Are Missing or Repetitive

What's going wrong: Without transitions, sentences sit next to each other like strangers at a bus stop — present, but unrelated. The reader has to do the logical connecting work themselves. When you do use transitions but reach for "however," "additionally," and "furthermore" on repeat, the writing sounds mechanical and formulaic.

How to diagnose it: Read only the first word of every sentence. Do the sentences feel logically linked to each other, or does each one feel like a fresh start? Yoast SEO's readability analysis specifically scores "consecutive sentences starting with the same word" — worth running.

The fix: Use transitions that match the actual logical relationship: contrast (but, yet, though), addition (also, plus, and), causation (so, because, therefore), sequence (first, then, finally). Vary them. And don't be afraid of starting a sentence with "And" or "But" — it's grammatically fine and creates natural rhythm.

☐ 7. You're Writing to the General Public Instead of One Specific Person

What's going wrong: "Everyone knows that..." and "People often find..." are signals that you're writing to a crowd. When you write for everyone, you end up writing for no one. The prose becomes non-committal, padded with hedges, and impossible to connect with personally. Readers want to feel like you're talking to them.

How to diagnose it: Count how many times you use "you" versus "people," "users," "everyone," "one." A higher ratio of "you" is almost always better. Also check whether your examples are specific (named tools, real scenarios, exact numbers) or generic ("a business might…").

The fix: Write to a single reader. Decide who: a 34-year-old content manager at a B2B SaaS company who's been told her blog traffic is down. Write to her. Use "you." Use her specific tools (Notion, Surfer SEO, Google Search Console). Specific beats general every time.

☐ 8. The Reading Level Mismatch Is Real — Run the Numbers

What's going wrong: You may have a vague sense that something reads "hard," but intuition isn't enough — you're too close to your own work. Readability scores give you an objective benchmark. The average American adult reads at a 7th–8th grade level. Most web content should target 6th–9th grade, depending on audience sophistication.

How to diagnose it: Run your content through at least two tools — they weight algorithms differently. Try: Hemingway Editor (grade level), Readable.io (Flesch-Kincaid + Gunning Fog + several others simultaneously), and Yoast SEO if you're on WordPress (built-in readability panel). Note where they disagree.

The fix: If your score is above grade 10 for a general audience: shorten sentences first (biggest impact), then replace polysyllabic words with shorter synonyms (utilize → use, commence → start, sufficient → enough). Re-run after each pass. It's iterative, not a one-step fix.

Before You Publish: The 3-Minute Final Pass

Once you've worked through the checklist, do one last thing: read the entire draft aloud. Not in your head. Out loud, with your actual voice. Your mouth will trip on every sentence that's too long, every phrase that doesn't scan, every place where the logic skips a step.

If you find yourself pausing to untangle a sentence while reading aloud, your reader will too — except they'll pause once and then close the tab.

Readability isn't about dumbing content down. It's about respecting the reader's time and cognitive load enough to get out of your own way. Clear writing is not simple thinking — it's disciplined communication. The ideas can be complex. The delivery should be effortless.

Fix the friction. The ideas will finally get through.