Articles come in all shapes and sizes. They are in newspapers, magazines, and posted on the Internet. They cover any and every topic imaginable. Despite the wide variety, there are guidelines common to all articles that can help you improve your articles' readability.

1) Plan Ahead

Without planning, your article is bound to come across as disorganized and difficult to read. Even short articles require planning to be as readable as possible.

Brainstorming is a great technique to help you figure out what topics you want to cover in your article. From the ideas you get, decide which topics are most important based on your intended article length. For example, if you're writing an article about dancing, you could write about the many types of dancing, dance classes, dance history… the list goes on.

If you want your article to delve deeply into one subject, make sure you restrict yourself to only one of your brainstormed topics. If your article is more of an overview, you have a bit more freedom with the number of topics you choose.

You may find that you'll have to brainstorm more than once to narrow down your topics sufficiently. If you chose dance history from the above example, you might brainstorm "subtopics" such as the dance history of a certain country, decade, or dance company. Again, depending on the aim of your article, you might choose only one topic to explore or several.

2) Research Your Topics

Most people read articles because they want to learn something about a particular subject. Your readers will be able to sense if your article is backed up with fact or not, so do your homework before you write. Your articles will be much more interesting if they are well researched. You'll also find you will have many more quality details to incorporate into your articles if you do adequate research first, and the more captivating facts you include, the more loyal readers you'll have.

3) Short, Short, and Simple!

It's the three "s"es of article writing: short sentences, short paragraphs, and simple English.

a) Short sentences are easier to digest than long ones. It's okay to vary sentences to make your writing more interesting, but still be careful about their length. A sentence that is too long will lose your audience's attention.

b) Short paragraphs are a necessity in article writing. In most cases, you should be able to restrict a paragraph to no more than five sentences for strong readability. If you have a particularly strong sentence you'd like to showcase, feel free to put it in a paragraph all on its own, but only do this once or twice per article.

c) Simple English is best in most types of writing, including article writing. You may want to use fancy words to impress your readers, but the majority of people are not likely to appreciate your efforts unless your articles are particularly academic. Write your sentences with simple, easy-to-understand words to appeal to the broadest audience.

Integrate the "short, short, and simple" rule into your articles and you are guaranteed to have a much more readable result. Remember that the best articles are informative and entertaining without being too wordy or complicated.