Cut out any non-essential information. (If it is still interesting or useful to have, put it into a separate section, a box or sidebar.) It will take you several drafts to get your information into a logical order, but it is worth persisting, as it makes the reading so much easier.

Sentence length
An early task when making your document easier to read is to make sure your sentences are short enough. That alone simplifies anything you have to say. People writing legal documents have suggested there should be no more than about 35 words to a sentence. For general readers, that usually is too long. For them, an average of about 15–20 words is long enough. As with most rules, there will be exceptions. It is sometimes important to vary sentence length in order to keep your readers awake. But when you use the occasional longer sentence, balance it with short ones.

For people with literacy barriers, aim for 15 to 20 words also, but be stricter with yourself about sticking to the shorter length.

The other way to measure this is to allow for no more than two simple clauses in a sentence. An example would be The girl patted the dog because it wagged its tail.

Jim Taylor, an outstanding teacher of editing, suggests that if you have only a few minutes to improve a document, look first at the sentence length. On average, there will be about 20 words in two to two-and-a-half lines (in 12 point type on a standard 8½ × 11 page). So, scan the document, using a pencil to circle every period. Then, wherever you find more than two lines between two consecutive periods, look to see if you can break the sentence down into two or even three sentences. You may need to add the occasional word to make the sentences work, but it is still an easy way to improve the readability of the document. Here is an example:

Lucy admitted that she hadn’t yet made the Jell-O, as we stood and watched the children in the schoolyard running, playing with yo-yos, jumping rope and waving from the top of the jungle gym.

34 words.

Now let’s see what we can do with it:

Lucy admitted that she hadn’t yet made the Jell-O, as we stood and watched the children in the schoolyard. They were running, playing with yo-yos, jumping rope and waving from the top of the jungle gym.

Two sentences, 19 words and 17 words respectively.

This “ideal” number of words per sentence has become lower over time. If you read Henry James, you’ll find much longer sentences. For instance, the opening sentence in The Turn of the Screw is 61 words long. As our lives have become more hectic, we have lost the time and habits needed for unhurried reading. We also receive much of our information and entertainment from television, a medium which requires less concentration than books. Consequently, writing has to accommodate this different lifestyle.