Is your web content smarter than a 15 year old?
I’ve been delving into reading ages for web content in the last few weeks.
I work at a university and the number one reason I hear from people pushing back on my plain language edits is “you’re dumbing it down” quickly followed by “If they can’t read to a college level they shouldn’t be at university!”
Comments like this are interesting because they show me the commenter has not thought about many people besides people like themselves. They might think writing simple language means dumbing things down — but actually, it means clearing the path so more people can understand and act. At the University of Waikato, 66% of our website content is written at a reading age of 15 or younger.
That’s not a failure. That’s solid content design.
Reading age and why it matters
Reading age doesn’t reflect intelligence — it reflects clarity.
The average New Zealander reads at about a 12–14 year-old level (Year 9 or 10). That includes parents, international students, support staff, and even busy academics scanning information on a page between meetings and lectures.
Writing that is clear and easy to grasp helps everyone. Including:
People using mobile phones in transit.
Readers with dyslexia, ADHD, or low literacy.
People reading English as a second language (that can include people whose primary language is Sign Language)
And honestly? Anyone who needs to understand something.
If content is too hard to read, people leave. They leave your website, they stop reading your newsletter, they put your report down, they close your paper. No one wants to “decode” a page full of information or read it twice.
66% is a celebration
We recently ran a reading age check across our public website - more than 10,000 pages. About two-thirds of our pages came in at a reading age of 15 or lower. That’s a huge achievement — especially considering we’re a university site, and much of our content deals with complex topics written by a variety of editors.
Our reading age means most of our pages are:
✔ Understandable
✔ Accessible
✔ Likely to be read
✔ Helpful for our main audiences
Well done to all of our distributed editor network. It’s a great place to start to improve too; I’ll report back with the next bit leap in the readability metric.
Keep content readable
Writing simply is not rocket science, but it does take thought. A few simple edits can make a big difference. Here’s what I have found helps:
Shorten long sentences. Aim for one idea per sentence.
Break up paragraphs. Three lines max is a good rule of thumb.
Use everyday words. “Help” instead of “assist”, “about” instead of “regarding”.
Ditch the fluff. Words like “currently” and “in order to” often aren’t needed.
Use headings and lists. These give the brain a break and help readers scan.
Check with a tool. Tools such as Microsoft Word, Screaming Frog, Grammerly, Hemingway for instance, can show you the reading age of your content.
remember: simple ≠ stupid. The best writers make complex ideas sound easy.
