I was trying to read an article earlier and couldn’t follow it. For a while I considered that it was my fault. Maybe I wasn’t focussing. Maybe I wasn’t awake enough - it was before 8am on a Saturday. And then I counted the sub-clauses in a sentence. And realised it wasn’t a reader problem. It was an author problem. And I abandoned the article.

The Plain English Campaign training we did at work last year has made me less likely to blame myself when I have problems reading. And Hemingway keeps me on track when writing.

Just to check my earlier assumption I’ve ran the article through Hemingway. It tells me that “9 of 63 sentences are hard to read” and “30 of 63 sentences are very hard to read”. Not just me then. Phew!

Now all I need is a filter that checks readability of an article before allowing me to add it to Instapaper. That would save me time and mental energy. And possibly a bit of self-confidence!