Here’s an interesting dichotomy: Killing time is the killer app for mobile devices. But mobile users are in a hurry and “get visibly angry” at verbose sites that waste their time.

Why?

“Even relaxation is purposeful behavior,” according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. “In information foraging theory, users seek to maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead.”

Sadly, interaction costs are inherently greater in mobile — all that swiping and scrolling and trying to remember what you can’t see on the screen adds up.

“Tolerance of padding on mobiles is a lot lower,” counsels the BBC in its writing news for mobile screens guidelines. “So people are even quicker to drop out. You have to get their attention instantly; grab them from the first sentence. It’s too easy to click away.”

So how do you give mobile readers more thrills and less interaction overhead? Cut the blah-blah. Readers won’t put up with filler on their phones.

Cut the blah-blah.

Nielsen once saw this electronic sign in an airport hotel lobby:

Really?! you might ask. This flight monitor will actually … monitor flights?

“Because the monitor’s meaning is obvious to anyone who has ever been on an airplane, the sign adds nothing,” Nielsen says. “Worse, it wastes people’s time as they ponder the cycling text, assuming that it will eventually say something important.”

After all, Nielsen points out, the sign could just say:

Avoid information pollution.

Call it information pollution — “excessive word count and worthless details” that make it hard for people to get good information.

Information pollution not only wastes time, it steals audience attention.

“Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds,” Nielsen says. “The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.”

So cut the fluff.

“In particular, ditch the blah-blah verbiage,” Nielsen says. “When writing for mobile users, heed this maxim: If in doubt, leave it out.”

Filler = bad.

Nielsen also sees this kind of “useless chatter” at the tops of many web pages.

“The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it’s pure filler — platitudes, such as, ‘Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful,’” he says.

“Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.”

Filler of all kinds irritates mobile readers. Consider this response from one participant in Nielsen’s mobile usability studies:

She felt duped because she didn’t get enough payoff from her investment of time and effort.

Cut to the chase.

“Let’s clean up our information environment,” Nielsen says. “Are you saying something that benefits your customers, or simply spewing word count? If users don’t need it, don’t write it. Stop polluting now.”

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Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.

Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper. He told them the facts:

Ephron and the other budding journalists condensed the who, what, when, where and why of the story into a single sentence:

“Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento …”

The teacher reviewed the leads, then paused for a moment.

“The lead for this story,” he said, “is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

Not ‘just the facts, ma’am’

What’s the point of your news story? It’s probably not really the five W’s and the H. Instead of focusing on the event, focus in the impact, or how the news affects your readers.

Covering a:

• Speech? Write about the most valuable thing the speaker said, not the fact that she spoke.
• Event? Focus on what people will be able to see and do at the event, not the time, date and place.
• Meeting? Center the piece on what was decided at the meeting and how it will affect the reader, not on the logistics of the meeting itself.

What would Miss Piggy do?

To reach readers, think like Miss Piggy and write about MOI, counsels management consultant Alan Weiss. That’s “My Own Interests,” from the reader’s perspective.

One way to do that is to shift your focus from event — what occurred, when, where and why — to impact. That will make your copy more interesting, relevant and valuable to your readers.

___

Sources: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007, pages 75-76.

Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler, Those Who Can…Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference, Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999, 95-96

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You’ve prewritten and freewritten your message. Now it’s time to rewrite it.

Here’s where you’ll edit, hit readability targets, and nail spelling, grammar and punctuation. This is what we used to call writing!

Here’s a checklist for getting the job done.

1. Check your point.

Is your topic sentence — aka nut graph — doing its job? Will readers need to hold study sessions to figure out what you’re trying to say? This isn’t a test-your-knowledge project: Your most important point should be clear and easy to understand.

2. Check your structure.

Whether you use mind maps, a Roman-numeral outline or — our favorite! — the three-boxes structure — make sure your organizational plan is holding up. An important part of your revision timetable is making sure your message makes sense and flows.

3. Check for clutter.

A big part of your revision time will focus on readability. So start revising your:

• Piece as a whole. Readers spend only a minute or two on the average brand message. If yours is much longer than that, you’ll lose control of the message. Remember, this isn’t a 10-page, essay-based assignment! Chances are your message would be twice as good if it were half as long.
• Paragraphs. Readers skip long paragraphs, so count the sentences of each paragraph to make sure yours is not too long.
• Sentences. Readers struggle to understand long sentences, so if yours are too long, you may not get the comprehension you need.
• Words. Word choice is the No. 1 predictor of readability. Reduce your average word length in characters. Replace adjectives and adverbs with stronger nouns and verbs. Translate jargon from the language of the organization into the language of the reader.
• Passive voice. One of the easiest revision techniques is to activate the passive voice: Write Subject, Verb, Object — not Object, Verb, Subject.
• Statistics. Writing with statistics? Take the numb out of numbers: Avoid statistics soup and other data dumps.
• Readability. All of these approaches will help you boost your Flesch Reading Ease, a scale of zero to 100 that measures quantifiably how easy your message is to read. The higher your number, the better your user experience.

4. Check your tone.

Make sure your message sounds the way you speak. Read your copy aloud. If it sounds delightful and conversational, like you, it’s good to go. If it sounds stiff and formal, soften the language.

Every day is Bring Your Personality to Work day when you’re a professional communicator. Choose a business casual writing style.

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How easy should email newsletters and e-blasts be to read? Very easy, according to a study of more than 40 million emails by Boomerang.

How easy?

Aim for the 3^rd-grade reading level. Emails written at that level got a 36% higher response than those written at a college reading level — and 17% higher response rate than those written even a high-school reading level.

Emails written at a 3^rd-grade reading level get a 53% response rate

To keep your readability high, choose short words and short sentences.

___

Source: Alex Moore, “7 Tips for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!),” Boomerang.com, Feb. 12, 2016

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It feels so good to talk about ourselves.

Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No wonder some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about our favorite subject.

Some 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about ourselves. — Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, Harvard researchers
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For the study, Tamir and Mitchell used an MRI scanner to see which parts of the brain responded when people talked about themselves. When participants were sharing their own pizza preferences and personality traits, researchers saw heightened activity in regions of the brain associated with the rewards we get from food, money or sex.

Avoid institutional narcissism.

I don’t know whether institutions also have pleasure centers, but they certainly seem to suffer from the same self-centeredness that afflicts we mere mortals. Consider their messages:

• XYZ Company today announces that …
• Our ABC is the leading doohickey in the blah-blah market …
• At LMNOP, we believe …

The problem with writing about us and our stuff is that, as Tamir and Mitchell’s research shows, your readers don’t want to talk about you. They want to talk about themselves.

So stop We-We-ing on your readers.

Readers don’t want your We-We.

We’ve known since 1934 that readers don’t respond to We-We. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale conducted a study that proved that first-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability.

First-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability. — Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale
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Fast forward to 2015, when Return Path proved the same thing: People are less likely to open and click through emails with first-person pronouns (I, me, our, mine) in the subject lines.

(I love how we keep “discovering” the same readership habits the classic researchers learned back in the day. These reader traits remain the same — over the decades, across media, throughout channels — because whatever else changes, our readers remain human.)

Top companies 57% less likely to We-We on readers.

No wonder high-performing organizations avoid We-We-ing on their readers. According to IABC UK’s research into how top organizations communicate:

• 71% of high-performing organizations focus on the audience’s point of view in their messaging. Just 45% of average organizations do.
• Top organizations are 60% more likely to focus on the audience perspective in communications than average organizations.
• Some 88% of average organizations say they like to talk about themselves; just 63% of top organizations do.

Focus on the reader’s favorite subject.

Instead of writing about your favorite subject, write about the reader’s.

They’ll love it. They’ll read it. They’ll open it, click through it and retweet it.

And that feels so good.

___

Sources: Robert Lee Hotz, “Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much,” The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2012

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Just 7% of adults around the world can manage conflicting requests to reserve a meeting room using a reservation system, then email people to let them know whether they got the room they requested.

Which means that if you create websites or other technological interfaces for technologically competent folks, you’ll miss 93% of worldwide adults ages 16 to 65, according to the 2017 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC^[1].

How low can you go?

The results?

Adults worldwide weighed in at an average problem-solving proficiency rate of 278 out of 500. That puts us at level 1, or basic, problem-solving skills.

That means that, on average, these adults can sort five emailed responses to a party invitation into pre-existing folders to track who can and cannot attend. But we struggle to locate on a spreadsheet with 200 entries members of a bike club who meet two conditions, then email the information to the person who requested it.

Below average

How do you communicate information via websites and other technological tools in an environment where many people struggle to solve problems using technology? Learn to write web copy and plan websites that overcome some of the obstacles of learning online.

About the study

PIAAC is a large, every-10-years study of adult literacy, developed and organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The study looks at literacy and numeracy, as well as problem solving in high-tech environments. The problem-solving study tested subjects’:

• Knowledge of how different technological environments (email, websites and spreadsheets) work
• Ability to use digital information effectively; understand electronic texts, images, graphics and numerical data; and locate, evaluate, and judge the validity, accuracy and relevance of that information

From 2012-2017, the PIAAC studied the skills of 150,000 adults, ages 16 to 65, in 39 countries.

____

^[1] Highlights of the 2017 U.S. PIAAC Results Web Report (NCES 2020-777). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.

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What do you notice about this passage, excerpted from an article in The Economist?

With the exception of “Winston” and “Churchill,” this 800-word story uses only one-syllable words. And, with an average word length of 3.7 characters, it scores a Flesch Reading Ease of 100.

Make 80% of your words one syllable long.

Take a tip from this passage: Use mostly one-syllable words.

Chances are, you won’t lose anything but reading difficulty. As Alden S. Wood, columnist on language and English usage, writes:

Use short words.

It is possible to write in mostly one-syllable words.

In fact, members of the “Club for One-Pulse Words” go so far as to speak exclusively in words of one syllable.

And you thought writing with short words was tough.
____

Sources: “In praise of short words,” The Economist, Oct. 7, 2004

Alden S. Wood, “Wood on Words: Keep it Simple,” IABC Communication World, December 1988

Ann Wylie, Cut Through the Clutter, Wylie Communications Inc., 2005

Dave Blum, “In Praise of Small Words,” The Wall Street Journal,  “Some Month, One Nine Eight Two”

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More than 80 years of readability research demonstrate that short words are easiest to read and understand. In fact, word length is the No. 1 predictor of readability.

We spend a lot of time talking about the magic number of words for blog content and other messages. Should you write longer articles or short posts?

What’s the sweet spot for attention spans? 200 words? 500 words? 2,000 words? And what role do search engines and keyword research play in these decisions.

But the real question about the best word length for blog posts isn’t average word count. It’s the number of characters per word.

Whether you’re writing a longer post or other types of content, keep your word length to five characters or less. (I know you can do it, because The New York Times does it every day.

Here are five ways to keep your words short:

1. Find long words.

Use your word count tool to find the average length of your words in characters. If it’s more than five, you need to cut long words.

Then eyeball your copy and scan for long words. Any word of three syllables or more is a candidate for replacing.

2. Use a better thesaurus.

Substitute shorter words where you can. A thesaurus can help. But don’t use Microsoft Word’s, which seems capable only of identifying longer words as substitutes.

Instead, try Visual Thesaurus, One Look Dictionary’s reverse dictionary or Thsrs (The shorter thesaurus). Enter a long word, like “ironic,” and it gives you a shorter word, like “dry” or “wry.”

3. Write about people doing things.

Think of your sentences as stories with clearly identifiable characters acting concretely, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Its failure could affect vehicle directional control, particularly during heavy brake application.”

Yes: “You won’t be able to steer when you put on the brakes.”

4. Make subjects characters.

Write about people doing things, not about things doing things, as in this example from the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Our expectation was for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that management interference with the strike or harassment of picketing workers was not permitted.”

Yes: “We expected the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to rule that management could not interfere with the strike or harass picketing workers.”

5. Turn actions into verbs.

Write in verbs, not nouns, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Growth occurred in Pinocchio’s nose when lies were told by him to Geppetto.”

Yes: “Pinocchio’s nose grew longer when he lied to Geppetto.”

Corollary: Nix nominalizations, or words that turn verbs (like explain) into nouns (like explanation).

6. Write to ‘you.’

Look at how writing directly to the reader streamlines syllables and sentences in this passage from the SEC’s “Plain English Handbook” (PDF):

Before — 5.1 characters per word:

This Summary does not purport to be complete and is qualified in its entirety by the more detailed information contained in the Proxy Statement and the Appendices hereto, all of which should be carefully reviewed.

After — 4.6 characters per word:

Because this is a summary, it does not contain all the information that may be important to you. You should read the entire proxy statement and its appendices carefully before you decide how to vote.

7. Write as you speak.

I often say to participants in my workshops, “You would never, ever say this.” Your voice is a good filter for the words you use in your message.

“Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”

― Ernest Hemingway, American author and journalist famous for his economical, understated style

So pass the “Hey! Did you hear?” test.

Say, “Hey! Did you hear?” Then read your message aloud. If it sounds as if your message logically follows those four one-syllable words, your message is crisp and conversational.

If it sounds like a neurological dissertation, make your words shorter and chattier.

8. Choose one-syllable words.

“Short words are best,” said Winston Churchill, “and old words when short are the best of all.”

Take a tip from Churchill — the only person I know of who slayed Nazis with words — and choose one-syllable words.

9. Choose Anglo-Saxon words.

English has two daddies: the Latin daddy, who spoke in long, abstract, fancy words about ideas, and the Anglo-Saxon daddy, who pointed at a rock and grunted, “ROCK!”

Choose from the Anglo-Saxon side of the family.

“After the Normans invaded England, Latin words became preferred by the country’s royalty, clergy and scholars. Latin words were, and still are, more formal and indirect than their dirt cheap Anglo-Saxon equivalents,” writes Bill Luening, senior editor, The Kansas City Star.

“Anglo-Saxon, the honest language of peasants, packs a wallop. In Anglo-Saxon, a man who drinks to excess is not bibulous but a drunk, a man who steals is not a perpetrator, but a thief, and a man who is follically-impaired is not glabrous, but bald. Direct language is powerful language.”

So make it a drunk, bald thief.

10. Don’t find a euphemism for ‘said.’

“Leave said alone,” writes Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar, The Poynter Institute. “Don’t be tempted by the muse of variation to permit characters to opine, elaborate, cajole, or chortle.”

11. Vary your word length.

“Experiment with melody, rhythm and cadence,” write Michelle Hiskey and Lyle Harris, journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Roy Peter Clark agrees. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute writes:

“Prefer the simple to the technical; put shorter words and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. … [R]eaders will remember how the story sounded and resonated in their heads long after they’ve put [your copy] down.”

12. Pack long words with short words.

The problem with most long words isn’t the words themselves, it’s the fact that people who use long words tend to use a lot of them in a row. Break up those multisyllabic pileups with one- and two-syllable words.

13. Put long words in short sentences.

The top two predictors of readability are sentence length and word length. If your words are on the long side, keep your sentences on the short side.

What’s the best word length for blog posts?

When writing articles, blog posts and other social media content, worry less about whether to write a long article or a short one. To increase social shares and other analytics, produce high-quality content — and keep words short.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry spent eight years teaching businesspeople how to write better. As he told Time magazine:

“I’d lecture a bunch of chemists or engineers about the importance of not saying ‘It would be appreciated if you would contact the undersigned by telephone at your earliest possible convenience,’ and instead saying ‘Please call me as soon as you can.’ That was revealed wisdom to these people.”

Take a tip from Barry: Avoid multisyllabic exhibitions of verbosity. Use short words.

What’s wrong with long words?

Why avoid long words? Because they:

1. Slash readability.

Word length, along with sentence length, are the top two indicators of reading ease, writes readability expert William H. DuBay in Unlocking Language (PDF). For more than 80 years, researchers have proven in the lab — again and again — that short, simple words increase readability.

Here’s what the researchers found:

• Long words are harder to read. In 1928, Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne of Winnetka, Illinois, published 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read. Of their 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read, the top three centered on word familiarity.
• Vocabulary top predictor of difficulty. “Vocabulary load is the most important [accompaniment to] difficulty,” found Irving Lorge, a psychologist at Columbia University Teachers College, in 1944.
• Short, simple words boost readability. Shortening and simplifying words reduced the reading grade level from 11th to 5th in a 1981 study by researchers Thomas Duffy and Paula Kabance.

2. Reduce comprehension.

The shorter the words, the easier your copy is to read. Indeed, virtually every readability index uses word length as one measure of reading ease — or difficulty.

• Familiar words are easier to understand. Comprehension increases with word familiarity and ease, found readability researcher Ralph Ojemann in 1934. Word difficulty was among the top four factors he found that reduce understanding.
• Hard words reduce comprehension. The more difficult words a passage included, the harder it is to understand, found Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale in 1934. The top two predictors of comprehension, they discovered, are the amount of jargon and the number of long or unfamiliar words.
• Common words boost understanding. Using only the percentage of common words and average number of words per sentence, Dale and Chall in 1948 published a readability formula that predicts comprehension with a 92% accuracy rate.
• One-syllable words increase comprehension. Shorter words increase understanding, found Edmund B. Coleman in his 1965 study measuring the percentage of one-syllable words.
• Word familiarity increases understanding. Word characteristics including functionality, familiarity and length affect comprehension, found readability expert G. R. Klare  in a 1976 review of 36 readability studies.

As Skip Boyer, the late executive producer and director of executive communication at Best Western International Inc. wrote: “Readers may know that utilize means use and optimum means best. But why make them translate?”

3. Suck the color from your piece.

Small words are compelling, as well as clear, because they’re often concrete. That is, they describe things rather than ideas. That helps our readers visualize your information so they understand it faster and remember it longer.

Let’s test that: Which do you see? A visual-duration-sensing apparatus? Or a clock?

4. Sound stuffy and bureaucratic.

When a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, “We are endeavoring to construct a more inclusive society,” FDR changed it to, “We’re going to make a country in which no one is left out.”

No wonder. Simpler words are more accessible — and less self-important.

Corporate communicator Chris Winters calls using stuffy, bureaucratic words the “Look, ma! I’m writing!” syndrome.

5. Don’t get shared.

The average length of a word in a tweet that gets retweeted is 1.62 syllables, according to a study by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella. Want to get the word out on Twitter? Use mostly one- and two-syllable words.

6. Make you sound pompous and dense.

Using stuffy words might make you sound stuffy. But it won’t make you sound smarter. In fact, people who use big words when smaller ones will do actually sound less intelligent, according to research at Stanford University.

7. Make you seem dishonest.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote English novelist George Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language.’ “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns … instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

Orwell also wrote: “Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.”

Still writing “single-operation computer architecture unit of data bus”? Stop it.

Small wonder

“Sure,” you say, “Ann Wylie can write using mostly one- and two-syllable words. She has little ideas. But my big ideas can only be expressed in big words.”

But one of the biggest ideas in the history of our country was expressed in the Gettysburg Address. Of the 235 words Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address (that’s fewer than the number on the back of a potato chip package today), 174 of them have only one syllable.

So we can express big ideas with small words. In fact, short words express ideas faster and to more people than long words.

And isn’t that what the best writers aim to do?

The post What is word length, and why should you care? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

An editor once counseled me to change all the instances of employment in an article to jobs.

Great advice. More than 80 years of readability research demonstrate that short, simple, familiar words are easiest to read and understand.

So if short words are better, how long should your words be?

If you’re writing in English, keep them to five characters on average.

This is important. Because short words are the No. 1 predictor of readability.

Write like The Times.

When I recommend to my clients that they limit their word length to five characters per word, they roll their eyes.

But when I tell them I know they can do it, because The New York Times does it every day, they sit up and take note.

We analyzed all stories in one edition of The New York Times. (We skipped the sports pages, thinking they might skew our results.) On that day, Times words:

• Ranged from an average of 4 characters per word (“Seeing the World Through Its Barbecue Joints“) to an average of 5.6 characters (“Wright Architecture School Sets Fund-raising Goal for Independence”).
• Averaged 4.9 characters per word.
• Weighed in at a median of 4.9 characters per word.

And, remember, the Times is covering topics ranging from rocket science and brain surgery.

What’s your average word length? Could you make big stories more accessible to more people if it were shorter?

Benchmark your word length against the best.

Need more evidence?

• The Wall Street Journal averages 4.8 characters per word. And that’s covering the most complex machinations of business.
• The BBC averages 4.7 characters per word. And that’s covering global news. (Benchmark your copy against telecomm and other trades.)
• The average word in the English language is 4.7 characters. Can you keep your average word length to 4.7 characters?
• Words of more than two syllables are hard words, according to the Gunning-Mueller Fog Index. The SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) index agrees. Can you write, on average, in easy words?
• Of the 235 words in the Gettysburg Address (that’s fewer than the number on the back of a potato chip package today), 174 of them have only one syllable.
• Winston Churchill entertained himself by writing essays of one-syllable words. (And he’s the only person, as far as I know, who ever slayed Nazis with his words.) The man won a Nobel Laureate for literature for his writing.

Two syllables? One? 4.7 characters?

Why so short?

Why so short?

The words we use most often in the English language are Anglo-Saxon. And most of those are single-syllable words: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, it, is, was, I and so on.

In fact, the 54 most-used words in the English language have just one syllable, according to WordCount, a website that chronicles how we use language. “About” comes in 55th, followed by even more one-syllable words. These super-short words make it possible to keep your overall average short.

And short words serve you, your audience and your organization better. Why not use them?

How to keep words short.

How do you keep your words within these character limits? Open your Microsoft Word document, and start using the word count tool.

Don’t use Microsoft Word? An online character count tool or other character counter will work just as well to help you find your word and character count.

At this point, you’re not worrying about keyword density, keeping your message under 280 characters or hitting any particular number of words in an article. You’re not counting words, you’re making sure the number of characters per word hits the target.

Once your online word counter tool says you’ve hit the mark, you can move onto online tools for SEO.

Learn other ways to keep words short.

Learn more about writing short words.

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