Editors say "make it simpler." Hard to act on. Here are five mechanical edits that reliably drop your grade level.
1. Cut sentences over 25 words in half. Every sentence over 25 words is a Flesch score bomb. Find them, find the natural break, add a period. Nothing fancy.
2. Replace Latin-root words with Germanic-root equivalents. "Utilize" → "use." "Demonstrate" → "show." "Commence" → "start." "Approximately" → "about." This swap alone moves Flesch Reading Ease by 3–5 points.
3. Kill the "-tion" nouns. "The implementation of the system" → "We built the system." Convert nominalizations back to verbs. Bonus: your writing sounds less corporate.
4. Delete filler phrases. "In order to" → "to." "At this point in time" → "now." "Due to the fact that" → "because." Each swap drops syllable count without losing meaning.
5. Put the verb early. "There are several factors that contribute to…" → "Several factors contribute to…" Expletive constructions ("there is," "it is") add words without adding meaning.
Run your text through our grader before and after. In our tests on 40 marketing paragraphs, applying these five edits dropped the Flesch-Kincaid score by 2.4 grades on average, from 11.8 to 9.4. Reading Ease jumped from 52 to 67.
What NOT to do: don't replace specific nouns with vague ones. "Nimiety" → "too much" is good. "Quarterly revenue variance" → "money stuff" is not.