Your content reads at year 12. Your readers are at year 7.
Run any government page through a readability formula. The result is usually the same: it tests at year 10, year 12, sometimes higher. The audience it was written for reads much lower.
This isn't an insult to readers. The last national survey put 44% of Australians aged 15 to 74 at literacy Level 2 or below. Level 3 is what most everyday text assumes. They can read your page. They read it with effort, with re-reading, and with a growing suspicion that it is hiding something.
That survey covered 2011 and 2012. It is still the most recent national measure of Australian adult literacy.
Effort is the point. Every extra grade shifts effort from your organisation to the public.
Why year 7
The Australian Government Style Manual is clear. For public content, write for a reading age of about year 7. Not because readers are children. Year 7 text is the level nearly everyone can read quickly, strong readers included. Specialists skim plain text faster too. Nobody has ever complained that a government letter was too easy to understand.
Why content drifts high
Content rarely starts complicated. It gets complicated on the way through. A subject expert adds precision. A lawyer adds caveats. A manager adds context. Every noun quietly swallows a verb. Each change makes sense on its own. The sum is a page that tests at year 12.
The drift survives because nobody measures it. Reading grade is invisible in a Word document. You can feel that a paragraph is heavy, but feelings lose arguments with legal.
Put a number on it
A readability score is a blunt instrument. Flesch–Kincaid, the common one, counts sentence length and word length, not meaning. But blunt instruments settle arguments. 'This page tests at grade 13 and our target is 7' beats 'this feels wordy' in any review.
Measure before you publish, not after someone complains. The pattern that works: check the grade, fix the sentences the score points at, check again. Two passes usually pulls a page down 3 or 4 grades without losing a single fact.
Where Confetti fits
We built Confetti for exactly this routine. Paste your draft, or drop in a Word document. It shows your grade against the year 7 target and highlights the sentences doing the damage. It flags passive voice, hidden verbs and Style Manual breaches as you go. It's deterministic — no AI, same answer every time — and free. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste ever leaves your machine. That matters when the draft is government content.
The number won't write the page for you. It will tell you the truth about the page you've written.
Photo created with help from AI
Did this land?
I write these to be used, not just read. Tell me if this wouldn't work in your organisation, and why.