How to Improve Text: Ways to Avoid Confusing Your Audience

Key takeaways 

• Clarity is critical: Clear writing helps audiences understand and apply information with confidence.
• Watch for warning signs: Long sentences, inconsistent terminology, frequent audience questions, and low engagement can signal unclear content.
• Actionable tips improve readability: Use simpler words, explain uncommon terms, and format content for easy scanning.
• Markup AI enhances clarity with AI-driven rewrite features that help make your content clearer, consistent, and aligned with brand standards.

If you’re responsible for creating help or training content, content clarity is key. You know you’re trying to achieve something very specific with your writing: You want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to understand and recall the information. The idea is that they should then be able to apply what they’ve learned to any number of tasks.

Sounds easy enough, but it doesn’t always work that way. After all, who hasn’t come across a manual or a set of directions that are confusing and hard to follow? Not only is it convoluted and full of jargon, the relatively easy task it describes also becomes confusing and difficult to perform.

Let’s have a closer look at the signs of unclear content. We’ve already named a few, but there’s more.

How do you know if your content is unclear?

Here are four signs your content might be unclear:

1. Sentences are too long or complex: It’s as simple as that – sentence length most often correlates with clarity. The longer a sentence is, the harder it is for readers to follow it from start to finish. Also, long sentences are often prone to complex grammatical structures, which are hard to process. 
2. Inconsistent terminology: Audit your own content and ask yourself whether you’re using the same terms for the same things throughout your content. Terminology inconsistency confuses your readers, so make it one of your top priorities when crafting compelling and clear content.
3. Frequent questions from your audience: To track this sign of unclear content, you need to talk with your support and customer service colleagues. For example: Does your organization receive a high number of product usage questions, or are your customers asking some questions repeatedly? This could be a hint that you need to have a look at the clarity of your product documentation, because missing clarity leads to misunderstanding, product misuse, and open questions. 
4. Low engagement or conversions: There are multiple reasons for low engagement and conversions. Unclear content is often the literal root of the problem, while short, clear messaging has a positive effect on engagement and conversions.

Tips to improve text clarity

Clarity is important for any content you create, especially when it’s designed to help or educate an audience. It’s critical that both you and your audience understand the content you’ve written.

To help with content clarity, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Always explain any terminology you use that isn’t common knowledge. Also, if there’s a way to communicate the same idea without using jargon, that’s probably the better way to go. Remember, the goal is to make your content as easy to understand and retain as possible.
2. If you’re using acronyms, make sure that you always spell them out on first reference. This will benefit anyone who’s not familiar with them.
3. Streamline your writing by using simpler words and shorter sentences and paragraphs. To do so, you’ll have to edit your content diligently, removing all of the excess verbiage that you don’t actually need.
4. Make the content easy to scan by using headings and bulleted lists. This will help direct readers to key points and break up the monotony of long passages of text. For longer documents, consider also including a table of contents to give readers an overview of the content in a single glance.
5. Write in an active voice. Assigning an actor to every action will help make your writing much clearer by eliminating ambiguity and clearly designating who is performing each activity.
6. By following tips like these, you’ll be able to write help and training content that’s easier for people to understand and learn from. As with any kind of writing, it’s a skill you can develop over time with a lot of practice.

Using an AI text improver

By using AI text improvers, you make your content clearer and more effective. But be aware of the fact that not every AI text improver is made for enterprise use. 

As a professional enterprise writer, choose a solution that is meant for enterprise use, providing safety and scalability. Also, you probably not only want to check your content for clarity, but also make sure it meets your organization’s writing standards and compliance requirements. If so, consider Content Guardian Agents^SM to solve all of your content challenges.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What makes content easy to understand?

Clear content uses simple language, consistent terminology, short sentences, and well-structured formatting that guides the reader through ideas effortlessly.

How does Markup AI help with writing clarity?

Markup AI checks content against your style and terminology standards, flags unclear or complex text, and suggests or applies rewrites that align with your writing goals.

What types of content benefit most from clarity improvements?

Help articles, training documentation, technical guides, and any instructional content especially benefit from clear, concise text.

Can clarity improvements boost engagement?

Yes, removing confusion helps readers focus on the message you want to convey, which improves engagement and conversion.