Three free ways to check whether your goal is written clearly enough to find the right measure — before you waste time measuring the wrong thing.
In PuMP, the Measurability Tests are how we find out if a goal is clear enough to measure meaningfully. Fail them, and you’re stuck rewriting the goal after the fact — which is exactly the rework we’re trying to avoid. One of the simplest ways to get ahead of that is to write goals in words a 10-year-old would understand, right from the start.
But even when you know the important parts for writing a measurable goal, when you write the goal yourself, it’s hard to spot your own jargon. You already understand what you meant by it. That’s exactly why you’re the wrong person to judge whether anyone else will.
Why your own read-through won’t always catch it
Familiarity does this to all of us. Once you know what “optimise service delivery” is supposed to mean, your brain fills the gap every time you read it back. The weasel words aren’t weasely to you.
To compound the problem, we’re all used to hearing management jargon in just about everything we do at work. So used to it, in fact, that it almost sounds completely natural and normal.
These two familiarity problems stubbornly thwart our best efforts to write clear goals:
- We don’t even notice some of the jargon and weasel words in our goals
- We replace the weasel words in our goals with more weasel words
Until it becomes second-nature to write goals that are clear enough to find the right measure — and yes, it can become second nature! — it’s worthwhile to get some external checks of how clear our goals really are. That’s what the tools below are for. They can’t faithfully rewrite the goal for you, but they can tell you, straight up, whether it’s as clear as you think it is.
The ‘goal clarity’ toolkit
Our toolkit for externally checking our goal language comes in three parts:
A readability checker
These score or highlight how easy your goal is to read, using the same logic Rudolph Flesch built his reading-ease formula on shorter words, shorter sentences, plainer language. Some of the current, free readability checkers include:
- Hemingway Editor’s free online AI proofreader uses a colour-coded system to highlight spelling, word difficulty and grammatical problems.
- ReadabilityPro’s free readability checker gives a Flesch Reading Ease score and the grade level that could understand it.
- WebFX can do a readability test of your website, your uploaded strategic plan, or any goal you paste into the editor. It also gives readability scores
- If you use Microsoft Word, it has a readability checker in File > Options > Proofing.
Ask AI to find your weasel words
This is the option that didn’t exist when this article was first written, and it’s arguably the fastest of the three. Paste your goal into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever you use, with a prompt along these lines:
“Here’s a strategic goal we’ve written: [paste goal]. Which words in it are vague or open to more than one interpretation? For each one, suggest what a 10-year-old would say instead.”
It won’t always get it right, and it’s not a replacement for the grammatical checkpoints that make a goal properly measurable. But as a fast first pass for catching jargon you’ve stopped noticing, it’s hard to beat.
The outsider read
The lowest-tech option, and still the most reliable. Hand the goal to someone outside the team, or outside the organisation altogether, and ask them to explain back to you what it means. Where they hesitate, or where their explanation doesn’t match yours, that’s your weasel word — found.
When a goal fails the check
A low readability score, or a list of words the AI flagged, or a blank look from your outsider reader — all three are telling you the same thing: the goal needs rewriting before it’s worth trying to measure. That’s a different job to checking, and the starting points have already been covered properly here on PuMP Academy:
- To deal with the vague language itself, see The Weasel Word Trap.
- To rebuild the goal properly — result-oriented, unambiguous, single outcome — see A Recipe for Writing a Measurable Goal.
The full technique for testing and rewriting goals so they are clear enough to find the right measure is, of course, the Measurability Tests from Step 2 in the PuMP Blueprint.
Worked example
Take a goal you’d recognise from half the strategic plans written this year:
“Accelerate our digital transformation journey to deliver a seamless, customer-centric experience across all channels.”
Run it through the readability checkers WebFX and ReadabilityPro and it doesn’t score low — it scores zero. Even the Hemingway Editor flags almost the entire sentence in red (which means the “sentence is very hard to read”).
That’s a useful result on its own, but a zero doesn’t tell you which words are the problem, and the free versions of these checkers won’t go that far. That’s where the AI prompt earns its place — ask it to translate word by word, and this is roughly what comes back:
| Word or phrase | What it’s actually hiding | What a 10-year-old might say instead |
|---|---|---|
| Accelerate | Faster than what pace? Starting when, by when? | “Do it quicker” — but quicker by how much, nobody’s said. |
| Digital transformation journey | “Journey” implies travel with no named destination. What changes, for whom? | “Use more computers and apps to do our jobs” — still doesn’t say what gets better. |
| Seamless | Seamless to whom, judged how? | “Doesn’t feel clunky or confusing” — closer, but still nobody would rate it the same way twice. |
| Customer-centric experience | Every organisation claims this. What would a customer actually notice? | “We think about what customers want before we decide things” — an intention, not something anyone could observe happening. |
| Across all channels | Which channels, exactly? “All” is doing a lot of unstated work. | “Everywhere someone might talk to us” — plainer, but still guessing what “all” was meant to cover. |
Notice what the table exposes that the zero score alone didn’t: even translated into plain language, most of these are still describing a feeling or an activity, not a result anyone could point to and say “yes, that happened.” That’s the real tell.
We could try again, taking on some of the ideas to de-weasel the goal:
Speed up our use of apps, AI and automation so that our customers have only one touch-point with us to get what they need.
ReadabilityPro scored this version as 73, and understandable by a 14 to 15 year-old. WebFX scored it the same, but suggested a 7th grader could understand it. Hemingway Editor only flagged ‘AI’ and ‘touch-point’ as potential grammatical problems with this new version.
But in truth, a vocabulary fix may not be enough to save this goal — it needs a conversation, to be sure that the true results intended by those who wrote it are not lost in translation. And that is exactly why the next section sends you to Weasel Word Trap and A Recipe for Writing a Measurable Goal rather than leaving you to patch individual words.
Where to next
Checking your goal’s language is the fast, cheap habit. It won’t fix a goal that’s action-oriented instead of result-oriented, or one that’s really five goals verbally stitched into a single statement — for that, you still need the full framework in PuMP’s Measurability Tests, the starting point in A Recipe for Writing a Measurable Goal or, if SMART is where you started, the SMART Goals guide. PuMP Licensee Brook Rolter makes a similar case well: goals that embed a target and timeline get read as an activity, not a result — worth a look at his take on why SMART goals alone aren’t enough.
But before any of that: run your goal through one of the tools above. You’ll be surprised how much you can’t see in your own writing until something outside your head points it out.