Which of these headlines is most likely to spur you to sign up for a webinar?

New webinar helps managers improve productivity

Or:

Get all your work done in half the time, be the office hero and go home early

The first focuses on the webinar. But the second one focuses on me doing things. That makes the second one more compelling.

Want to watch your words get shorter, your sentences sleeker? See your passive voice disappear and your readability soar? Energize your writing?  Populate it with real, live humans? Focus on benefits instead of features?

Use the active voice in writing. In other words, write about people doing things.

Why use the active voice in writing?

When you write about people doing things, you:

1. Activate passive sentences. You know the difference between active and passive voice:
   • In a sentence written in passive voice, the subject is acted upon by the object. Object verb subject.
   • In a sentence written in active voice, the subject performs the action. Subject verb object.

That’s important: Writing in the active voice helps people read sentences faster, understand them more easily, remember them longer and enjoy the process more.

People doing things — Subject verb object — is the structure of the active voice. So turn passive-voice sentences into active-voice sentences by writing about people doing things:

No: Mortgage payments must be made …

Yes: Homeowners must make mortgage payments …

2. Improve readability. Writing in the passive voice also makes sentences and words longer and reduces readability. Take this passage:
No: Medicaid eligibility is organized by category or population each of which has different rules for how much income and resources you can have. For the most part, only citizens and qualified immigrants can qualify. The largest Medicaid categories covering most eligible individuals are Children under age 19, Parents raising children under age 19, Pregnant Women, Individuals 65 and older, and Persons with Disabilities.
The subjects of these sentences are Medicaid, citizens and categories. Write about people doing things, and you make messages easy to read:
Yes: Are you eligible for Medicaid? That depends on who you are, how high your income is and how many other resources you have. The largest groups of people who qualify for Medicaid are:
• Children under 19
• Parents raising children under 19
• Pregnant women
• People 65 and older
• People with disabilities

The difference in readability between writing about Medicaid and writing about you? Sentences are 73% shorter; words, 111% shorter; and Flesch Reading Ease is up 192%.

How to use the active voice in writing

The Little Red Schoolhouse writing course recommends that you:

1. Use the simple sentence structure: Subject verb object. Think of your sentences as short stories with clearly identifiable characters acting concretely.

   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.

2. Make subjects humans. Write about people doing things, not about things doing things.

   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.

3. Write in verbs, not nouns. Nix nominalizations, or words that turn verbs (like explain) into nouns (like explanation).
   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.

   OK, that one’s been through the De-Verb-O-Rizer a few times! Look at the verbs buried in those nouns: expectation, ruling, interference, harassment.

   Don’t commit verbicide. Write about people doing things:

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

Active voice in action

Wendy Jorgensen increased readability of this message by 40%, mostly by focusing on people doing things.

Here’s the City of Plano senior marketing and communication coordinator’s before:

Note that 70% of these sentences focus on things doing things, not on people doing things.

Here’s Wendy’s after:

This time, 92% of the sentences focus on things doing things, not on people doing things. What a difference in readability that makes. By writing about people doing things, Wendy:

• Whittled word count by 13%.
• Slashed paragraph length by 68%.
• Streamlined sentences by 45%.
• Reduced syllables per word.
• Reduced Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level by 38%.
• Increased Flesch Reading Ease by 40%.

Want results like these for your own message? Use the active voice in writing. Write about people doing things.

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Here’s the problem with long sentences: Every time you add a word, you reduce comprehension. Add another one, reduce it even further. Add another one, reduce it even further.

There’s almost a one-to-one correlation between sentence length and understanding, according to a study by the American Press Institute.^[1] The research, based on studies of 410 newspapers, found that with average sentences of:

• 8 words or less, readers understood 100% of the story.
• 14 words, readers understood 90% of the information.
• 43 words, readers understood less than 10%.

And that 107-word sentence your subject-matter expert made you write? After reading that sentence, your readers not only don’t know what they’ve read, they also forget where they parked the car. That’s a net loss of knowledge — not exactly our goal as communicators.

It’s not just the American Press Institute. Nearly 140 years of research shows that short sentences are easier to read and understand.^[2] In fact, sentence length has been proven in the lab — again and again — to be one of the top two predictors of reading ease. (Word length and familiarity is the No. 1 predictor.)

That’s because in long sentences, the subject, verb and object are too far away from each other. They have to rewrite the sentence in their heads so they can understand.

How many times are they going to do that? If it’s my sister’s oncologist, sure, I’ll do it all day long until I understand what’s going on. But if it’s a brand message — a news release or an email newsletter or blog post — I’m not going to work that hard, and neither are your readers.

Breathe or burn.

Because long sentences reduce understanding, one of my college professors used to make us read our long sentences aloud in front of the entire class. If we ran out of breath before we ran out of sentence, we got an embarrassing reminder of the importance of short sentences.

One professor out there is crueler than mine. He’d make his students light a match and read their sentences out loud. If they ran out of match before they ran out of sentence, they got a painful reminder of the importance of short sentences.

Why short sentences?

Short sentences:

Increase readability

• Sentence length and complexity make up half of the 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read, found researchers Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne in 1928.^[3] Those attributes included words per sentence, complex sentences and conjunctions, which link phrases together into longer sentences.
• Sentence length and the percentage of prepositions compose half of the four elements that achieve a virtually perfect reading grade level correlation, found Edmund B. Coleman in 1965. Prepositions combine clauses into longer sentences.^[4]
• Shortening and simplifying sentences made revised copy six grade levels easier to read, found researchers Thomas Duffy and Paula Kabance in 1981.^[5]

Increase understanding

• Long sentences decrease comprehension, found readability researcher Ralph Ojemann in 1934. He found that sentences including prepositions and dependent clauses reduced understanding.
• The more indeterminate clauses a passage includes, the harder it is to understand, found Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale in 1934. Why? Indeterminate clauses make sentences longer and increase the number of ideas per sentence.^[6]
• Five sentence characteristics — including length, passive voice and embedded clauses — affected comprehension, found readability expert G. R. Klare in 1976.^[7]

So … how long is too long?

____

Appendix

^[1] American Press Institute via Jon Ziomek, associate professor emeritus, Medill School of Journalism

^[2] William H. DuBay, Unlocking Language (PDF), Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2006

^[3] William H. DuBay, Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies (PDF), Impact Information, 2006, p. 55

^[4] William H. DuBay, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text (PDF), Impact Information, Jan. 25, 2007, p. 80

^[5] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), Impact Information, Aug. 25, 2004, pp. 39-40

^[6] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), p. 16

^[7] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), p. 39

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If your sentences are too long, readers won’t understand them.

So how can you write shorter sentences? Here are six ways to streamline sentences:

1. Find long sentences.

Paste your message into the Hemingway Editor. It will show you which sentences are hard (yellow highlighting) or very hard (red highlighting) to read.

Then replace complicated sentences with simple sentences, longer sentences with shorter sentences. Separate dependent clauses; change passive into active voice.

Keep working until you’ve cleared all of the colored highlights out of your text.

2. Use more periods.

The story goes that when future columnist James J. Kilpatrick was a young newspaper reporter, he wrote lots of deadly long sentences. Finally, in frustration, the city editor gave Kilpatrick a piece of paper covered with dots.

“These interesting objects, which apparently you have never encountered before, are known as periods,” the editor said. “You would do well to use them.”

We’d all do well to use more periods. Just hear what these experts have to say:

“There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

— William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well

“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize-winning author

So scan your copy for punctuation marks other than periods. Those include colons, commas, dashes, ellipses, parentheses, semicolons. These punctuation marks connect dependent and independent clauses together to create sprawling sentences.

These writing pros aren’t fans:

“I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.”

— Florence King, author of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable and question whether it is necessary.”

— H.W. Fowler, English lexicographer

“The semicolon is “the only unretweetable punctuation mark.”

— Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist, based on his study of 1 million retweets

“My thought for the day is that the semicolon rarely helps a passage; usually it creates little more than clutter. This is my second thought for the day: The semicolon rarely helps a passage. Usually it creates little more than clutter.”

— James J. Kilpatrick, journalist and author of The Writer’s Art

“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.”

— Poet Richard Hugo

When you find commas, dashes, semicolons and other punctuation marks, see whether you can substitute a period instead. As Kilpatrick writes:

“The period, believe me, is the best friend a writer will ever have.”

You would do well to use them.

3. List lists.

If you have a series of three or more items, break them out of the sentence into a bulleted or numbered list. Readers perceive bullets as each being separate sentences and paragraphs.

This is especially important online, where readers skim even more than they do in print. In one test, usability expert Jakob Nielsen made a webpage 47% more usable by breaking copy up and lifting ideas off the page. ¹

4. Search and destroy conjunctions.

Another way to shorten sentences is to reduce the number of conjunctions.

Conjunctions glue phrases together into long sentences. So if your sentences are too long, use Microsoft Word’s Find function to search for conjunctions. They include and, or, also, but, so, then and plus.

When one of my writing coachees who wrote deadly long sentences tried this trick, she found 23 ands in a 500-word article. Those are pretty good clues for places to shorten.

When you find conjunctions, see whether you can replace them with a period. Or, instead of replacing them, start your sentence with a conjunction.

5. Pass on prepositions.

Reducing the number of prepositions is another way to shorten your paragraphs.

Because prepositions link words and phrases together, they make sentences longer and harder to understand. Since 1928, researchers have shown that prepositions reduce comprehension (Vogel and Washburne, 1928; Ojemann, 1934; Lorge, 1944; Coleman, 1965; Klare, 1976). ²

Take this sentence, from a Starbuck’s release …

“By far, this is the most angst-ridden decision we have made in my more than 25 years with Starbucks, but we realize that part of transforming a company is our ability to look forward, while pursuing innovation and reflecting, in many cases, with 20/20 hindsight, on the decisions that we made in the past, both good and bad.”

That sentence weighs in at 58 words, glued together with 10 prepositions. As the Rev Up Readership member who called this to my attention said:

“Apparently, someone in their PR department had too many cafe mochas and went a little crazy with the prepositional phrases.”

6. Don’t fix fragments.

Mrs. Webb, your 3rd-grade teacher, probably counseled you to avoid sentence fragments. Mrs. Webb was wrong. Sentence fragments can help you:

• Create drama.
• Make a transition.
• Emphasize an important idea.
• Change the pace of your piece.
• Make your copy sound conversational.
• And, of course, make sentences shorter.

Used strategically, fragments can make your copy tighter and more interesting.

Period.

____

Sources:

^[1]Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, “Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web,” Nielsen Norman Group, Jan. 1, 1997

^[2]William H. DuBay, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text, Impact Information, Costa Mesa, California

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How can you activate a passive sentence?

1. Identify the passive voice.

First, identify passive sentences.

Active voice

The active voice uses simple sentence structure:

Subject, verb, object.
Man bites dog.

Passive voice

Invert that simple sentence structure, and you’ve got a passive voice sentence:

Object, verb, subject.
Dog is bitten by man.

Note how the subject of the sentence is no longer performing the action of the verb.

Passive voice, agent deleted

Sometimes we drop the subject altogether:

Object, verb.
Dog is bitten.

As a friend from FedEx says, “If you can add by my grandma to the end of a sentence, it’s probably passive voice, agent deleted.” 

Dog is bitten by my grandma.

2. Avoid passive problems 

You can see the problems. A passive sentence:

Reduces comprehension. Passive voice is harder to understand than active voice, found G. R. Klare in a review of 36 readability studies. In fact, of the Top 5 characteristics that make sentences harder to read, passive voice ranked No. 2.

In another study, Robert Charrow and linguist Veda Charrow found that jurors understood active passages 31% better than passive ones.

Is longer than active voice. Passive voice can take up to two-thirds more words than the active voice.

Has a slippery, untouched-by-human-hands feel. Compare: “I made mistakes” to “Mistakes were made.”

With the passive voice, it sounds as if nobody was in the room when it happened. As a result, the passive voice hurts your credibility by making readers wonder what you’re hiding. As Joseph M. Williams, author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, says:

“Choose the passive when you don’t know who did it, your readers don’t care who did it, or you don’t want them to know who did it.”

“Don’t know, don’t care, don’t want them to know” shouldn’t happen very often.

Saps energy from sentences. Passive voice transforms energetic verbs — bites, for instance — into forms of the verb to be, such as is bitten.

Isn’t conversational. We don’t speak in the passive voice, so we shouldn’t write that way.

3. Make sure the subject is doing the verb.

An editor friend was once surprised on reviewing an engineer’s contribution to a company newsletter to find that it was absolutely free of the passive voice.

When the editor praised the engineer, he said, a bit huffily:

“I know that every sentence needs a subject and a verb and that the subject should be doing the verb.”

That’s as good an explanation as I’ve heard on how to write in the active voice. (It’s so good, I’ve threatened to make it a T-shirt or tattoo!)

To activate the passive voice, read the sentence and find the verb:

bitten

Figure out who’s doing the verb:

man

Put that person in front of the the active verb:

Man bites dog.

Now your sentence includes subject, verb, object — in the right order. It’s active!

And that’s how you avoid passive voice misuse.

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The more information you have, the better decisions you can make, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that doctors make better diagnoses when they have less information. Shoppers buy more when they have fewer options. Accountants are more effective when they have less information. So are investors, seniors, psychologists and Marines.

Let’s take a look at the research …

Doctors make better decisions with less information.

A cardiologist named Lee Goldman created an equation to take the guesswork out of treating chest pain, Malcolm Gladwell reports in Blink. Doctors, he found, would make the best diagnoses if they combined ECG results with the answers to just three questions:

• Is the patient’s pain unstable angina?
• Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs?
• Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?

When emergency room doctors at Cook County Hospital (the one that inspired the TV show “ER”) used Goldman’s equation, they diagnosed heart attacks correctly 95% of the time. When they gathered lots of additional information about the patient, they diagnosed heart attacks correctly just 75% to 89% of the time.

So consider user intent. Are these folks supposed to make good decisions based on your content? If so, a high-quality short-form piece might make more sense.

Accountants are more successful with less information.

Two accounting professors at the University of South Carolina hypothesized that too much information would overload accountants studying companies’ fiscal health.

That overload, Eugene G. Chewning Jr., Ph.D, CPA, and Adrian M. Harrell, Ph.D, believed, would hurt the accountants’ decision-making abilities. So they decided to test that theory.

The professors gave each of 84 accountants and accounting students four to eight financial ratios (such as P/E, or price/earnings ratios).

Then they asked these participants to predict whether a company would suffer some kind of financial distress — such as filing for bankruptcy, defaulting on a loan payment or missing a stock dividend payment — within the next three years.

Accountants were more successful at predicting the right outcome when they received six ratios instead of four.

But when they received eight ratios, they were less successful than when they received only six ratios.

Why?

Because the more information they received, the less they used. When they were given six ratios, the accountants actually used five; but with eight, they incorporated only four ratios into their decision-making process.

“The decision maker is considered to have experienced information overload at the point where the amount of information actually integrated into the decisions begins to decline,” Chewning and Harrell write. They may not even be aware that they’re doing it.

Shoppers, investors, others perform better with less.

Indeed:

• Shoppers buy more when they have fewer options. In one study, researcher Sheena Iyengar set up a tasting booth of gourmet jams. When offered six flavors, 30% of folks who stopped by the booth bought some jam. When faced with 24 options, only 3% of shoppers made a purchase.
• The more information they get, the less likely employees are to opt into their 401(k) plans. In a study for Vanguard, Iyengar found that for every 10 funds a company added to its options, the number of employees enrolling dropped by 2%. With two options, 75% of employees participated; when there were 59 funds, only 60% enrolled. “If it’s a lot of work to choose among the funds, many people will postpone the decision and never sign up,” she says.
• Seniors perform poorly when overwhelmed with Medicare plans. When seniors had to choose a Medicare prescription drug benefit, they were overwhelmed by dozens of similar options. In the end, some 10% of seniors didn’t enroll by the deadline, even though it meant they’d have to pay extra to enroll late.

Too much information also made it harder for psychologists to diagnose patients and for Marines to win battles, Gladwell reports.

Short-form content also makes messages easier to read, more efficient to read, and easier to understand and remember. And it helps readers choose more wisely.

Is that extra word count really worth it?

‘Selecting is stealing resources from understanding.’

Why do people use fewer pieces of information when they have more?

Before they’re overloaded with information, people spend their time understanding the information they receive. When they have more information than they have time to process, they spend their time instead selecting which information to process.

“‘Selecting’ is stealing resources from ‘understanding,’ resulting in poorer decisions,” writes TJ Larkin, principal of Larkin Communication Consulting.

Are you giving your readers so much information that they’re focused on selecting instead of understanding? If so, you may be hurting their ability to make good decisions.

Don’t drown them in data.

It would seem that the more information we give people, the better off they’d be. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. The more information people get, it seems, the worse their decision-making skills become.

Is that really the purpose of your content marketing strategy?

“Having an abundance of information does not always translate into” informed choices, write researchers Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters. “The amount of information may exceed human information processing skills.”

And when that happens, people shut down. They may simplify the decision by relying on others’ advice, by ignoring some of the information or by basing their decisions on the wrong things. Or they may not make a decision at all (Hibbard, Slovic and Jewett, 1997).

Does your long form content require too much of your readers? What types of content might be better if they’re shorter?

In Blink, Gladwell writes:

“We take it, as a given, that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are. …

“But what does the Goldman algorithm say? Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all … In fact … that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”

As Tom Rosenstiel, former media critic for the Los Angeles Times, says:

“You’re not more informed. You’re just numbed.”

Are you informing your readers? Or just numbing them?

____

Sources: Eugene G. Chewning Jr. and Adrian M. Harrell, “The Effect of information Load on Decision Makers’ Cue Utilization Levels and Decision Quality in a Financial Distress Decision Task,” Accounting, Organizations and Society, vol. 15, no. 6, 1990, p. 527-542

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, January 11, 2005

Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peter, “Supporting informed consumer health care decisions: data presentation approaches that facilitate the use of information in choice,” Nov. 6, 2001.

Ksenia Iastrebova, Managers’ Information Overload: The Impact of Coping Strategies on Decision-Making Performance, Ph.D. Thesis from Erasmus University, Rotterdam, March 2, 2006

TJ Larkin and Sandar Larkin, “Information Overload Hurts Performance,” Larkin Page, No. 57, March 2007

Penelope Wang, “How to make better investment choices,” Money, June 2, 2010

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Here’s a famous story among persuasion researchers and Malcolm Gladwell fans:

When a researcher offered shoppers 24 types of jam, many customers stopped by for a sample, but only 3% made a purchase. But when the researcher offered only six kinds, 30% of shoppers ended up buying jam.

“When people had too many choices, they just walked away,” says Sheena Iyengar, the researcher and author of The Art of Choosing.

Iyengar, a business professor at Columbia University, studies how people make decisions. When it comes to choice, her research shows again and again, less is almost always more.

Avoid overwhelming people.

People are also overwhelmed by the amount of information it takes to make decisions about:

401(k) plans. In a study for Vanguard, Iyengar found that for every 10 funds a company added to its options, the number of employees enrolling dropped by 2%. With two options, 75% of employees participated; when there were 59 funds, only 60% enrolled.

“If it’s a lot of work to choose among the funds, many people will postpone the decision and never sign up,” she says.

Medicare plans. When seniors had to choose a Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2006, they were overwhelmed by dozens of similar options. In the end, some 10% of seniors didn’t enroll by the deadline, even though it meant they’d have to pay extra to enroll late.

The problem, Iyengar says: “The program designers focused primarily on giving people quantity but not on quality.”

Health care plans. One of the most complex decisions we ask consumers to make is to choose among health insurance plans.

It’s not uncommon for consumers to have to compare more than 15 plans on each of 10 to 12 factors. And integrating different types of information and different types of variables makes decision-making even harder, according to researchers (Payne, Bettman and Johnson, 1993; Slovic, 1995).

Making matters worse, this information often:

• Includes technical terms and complex ideas
• Requires the reader to weigh factors based on their own values, preferences and needs
• Calls for readers to also consider coverage, benefits and costs

“More information doesn’t always improve decision-making; in fact, it can undermine it.”

— Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters, researchers

For instance, if one hospital has high consumer satisfaction scores but average measures of safety and effectiveness, and another is highly effective but ranks low in satisfaction and safety, how do consumers weigh these factors in their choices?

What’s wrong with choice?

Making a choice takes three mental tasks, Iyengar says:

• Figuring out what you want
• Understanding the options
• Making trade-offs

This exercise becomes more complex as the choices multiply.

It would seem that the more information we give people, the better off they’d be.

But “having an abundance of information does not always translate into” informed choices, write researchers Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters. “The amount of information may exceed human information processing skills.”

And when that happens, people shut down. They may simplify the decision by relying on others’ advice, by ignoring some of the information or by basing their decisions on the wrong things. Or they may not make a decision at all (Hibbard, Slovic and Jewett, 1997).

4 ways to reduce option overload.

So how can you make it easier for your readers to make a decision — instead of giving up and going home? Here are four ways to do that:

1. Reduce the number of options. People can keep track of five to nine choices, according to 60 years of brain research. Increase that to 20 or 30 options or more, and people become paralyzed or frustrated.

2. Think in decision layers. Try the three-by-three rule: Offer a matrix of three categories, each with three options. That’s nine options, but presented in a way that’s easier to think through.

Instead of deciding between nine options, readers make two decisions between three options each.

3. Present information clearly. “How information is presented may be just as influential as what information is presented,” Hibbard and Peters write.

To help the reader understand:

• Reduce cognitive effort. Reduce the amount of information you present through decision-support tools, an information intermediary or visual displays of quantifiable information.
• Bring the experience to life. Show people what the decision will mean to them in real life through narratives, vivid details and tailoring.
• Reframe the data. Help readers see the significance of the information by highlighting, framing and otherwise presenting the data.

“Most presentations of comparative information are based on the assumption that consumers know what is important to them and where their self-interest lies,” Hibbard and Peters write. “These assumptions are faulty.”

4. Make it vivid. Show, don’t tell. Instead of asking how big a risk readers can tolerate, give them a picture of that risk.

Literally.

When Iyengar asked study participants whether they’d like a free ticket to see amazing scenery but with a steep drop-off from a cliff, 90% took the free ticket. But when she showed pictures of that steep drop-off, only 50% accepted the ticket.

“When there’s a vivid scenario — say, a picture of money leaving your wallet, not just a number — people understand the consequences better than when they are presented with abstract notion of risk,” Iyengar says. “Casinos know this, which is why they have you gamble with chips, not actual money.”

Other benefits of short form digital content

Short form digital content also makes messages easier to read, more efficient to read and easier to understand and remember. And it helps readers make better decisions.

How long should your content really be?

_____

Sources:

Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters, “Supporting Informed Consumer Health Care Decisions: Data Presentation Approaches that Facilitate the Use of Information in Choice,” Annual Review of Public Health, 2003, Vol. 24, pp. 413-33

Penelope Wang, “How to make better investment choices,” Money, June 2, 2010

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Talk about TMI: Your readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers — ads included — every single day, according to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Too much incoming, too little getting in

But with all that incoming, very little information gets through to our readers. People spend, on average:

1. More than five hours a day on interpersonal emails, according to the 2019 Adobe Email Usage study. That includes:

• Three-plus hours a day on work messages: “Can we meet at 3?” “Here’s the report I promised.” “When can you get me the social media strategy?”
• Two-plus hours a day on personal email: “Would you pick up Greek yogurt on your way home from work?” “I have good gossip; meet for margaritas at 5?” “May I show you the most darling picture of my kitty?”

Add Slack and text messages, and you can see that we spend the bulk of our days communicating interpersonally.

But that’s not the kind of information PR pros and other communicators are worried about …

2. 48 minutes a day reading for business, according to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit and Peppercomm.

That includes The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, the best trade publications in the business, PR Tactics and other association publications, the latest leadership books, the HubSpot blog and more.

Whatever time remains — and that’s not much — may get divvied up between business-to-business brand content.

Let’s get real: How much of that 48 minutes are they spending with your white paper?

3. 16.2 minutes a day reading for fun, according to the 2019 American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Right now, I’m squeezing into my 16.2 minutes a day: Melissa Banks’ novel The Wonder Spot, Psychology Today, a guidebook on Uruguay and The New York Times.

That leaves virtually zero seconds for your email newsletter on “3 reasons you need an eye exam (even if you have 20/20 vision),” your message inviting me to share my thoughts on your business or other business-to-consumer messages.

Let’s get real: How much of that 16.2 minutes are they spending with your email newsletter?

How to get through to readers …

One way to get through to readers with way too much to read and way too little time to read it is to give readers more for less. Give them more information they can use to live their lives better in less time and space.

Keep this formula in mind: The average reader reads about 200 words per minute. That means they’re reading, on average, 9,600 words a day for work and 3,240 for fun.

Does it make sense for you to ask them to spend a third of that on your blog post?

Let’s get real.

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I had Mexican Monday with one of my favorite tech friends the other day. “Ann,” he says, “when are you going to start helping your clients use ChatGPT to write better messages faster?”

Gulp! Just the other day, I heard myself say in a PRSA webinar, “If you can’t write better than a robot, you’re in the wrong business.”

Turns out I was wrong.

People write better and faster with AI.

People who use ChatGPT to write messages get the job done 59% faster than those who don’t, according to a study by MIT researchers Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang. (And some of these folks had never used ChatGPT before, so that includes learning-curve time.)

Plus, those who used AI in writing produced better messages. Writers sco­red 4.5 on a 1 to 7 quality scale with ChatGPT, 3.8 without it.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take an 18% boost in quality in less than half the time any time!

AI IS COMING!

Let’s pause for a minute and address the robot in the room: Am I afraid I’m going to lose my job to AI? No. But I don’t want to lose my job to someone who knows how to manage AI better than I do.

Think of ChatGPT is a really good virtual assistant — one who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t need to be paid and has read just about every book in the world (up until 2021). If you know how to use it, ChatGPT can help you write better, easier and faster.

But it’s up to you to know how to write well enough to give ChatGPT good direction, to review its work for accuracy and to edit what may or may not be a good first draft.

5 ways to write more clearly with ChatGPT

So how can you get your new, free assistant to help you Rev Up Readability in your next assignment? Try these prompts:

1. Rewrite this in plain language.
2. Rewrite this so a [your target]-grader could understand it.
3. Rewrite this to hit [your target] on the Flesch Reading Ease score.
4. Rewrite this with [your target]- to [your target]-sentence paragraphs.
5. Rewrite this to average [your target]-word sentences with a [your target]-word maximum sentence length.

Now, polish up what ChatGPT gives you and press send!

You’re already getting better at writing with AI.

The post Try these 5 ChatGPT prompts for writing clearly appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Beware adverbs, counsels The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.

Too often, they dilute the meaning of the verb or repeat it: “The building was completely destroyed.”

Instead, of using adverbs to intensify meaning, Clark suggests, use them to change meaning.

“‘Killing Me Softly’?” he writes. “Good adverb. “‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.”

Good modifiers:

Same thing works with adjectives. Use them to change, not intensify, meaning:

“Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.”

— Michael Chabon, author, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“The combination of a hard-won cynicism, low overhead, an unstintingly shoddy product line, and the American boy’s unassuageable hunger for midget radios, X-ray spectacles, and joy buzzers had enabled Anapol not only to survive the Depression but to keep his two daughters in private school …”

— Michael Chabon, author, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“After the coffee he recrossed the room and remained standing, stooped over the keyboard in his overcoat, while he played with both hands by the exhausted afternoon light the notes as he had written them.”

— Ian McEwan, author, in Amsterdam

‘Gently ransacked’

So, in a recent writing contest, I asked you to show us how it’s done. Two of you took me up on the challenge.

Barbara Scanlan, principal of Scanlan Creative, described Iditarod sled dog teams facing snowless conditions on the Alaska Range:

“The dogs ran along at record speeds, while the sleds, often with brakes and runners worn out, bounced helplessly behind them.”

And Amy Bridges, manager of sales proposals and RFP support for Sabre Travel Network, submitted this entry:

“The conscientious copy editor gently ransacked her confidence with every ‘Track Changes’ slash and smash.”

Barbara, your submission is beautiful. But I can’t resist your topic, Amy. Congratulations, and watch your mailbox for Words on Words, a favorite tome by my late, great copyediting teacher, John Bremner.

And thank you both for playing.

How can you use adverbs to change, not intensify, meaning?

___

Source: Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Little, Brown and Company (September 1, 2006)

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Turns out a Southwestern Tex-Mex salad by any other name would not taste as good.

Vivid menu descriptions — “applewood-smoked bacon,” “Maytag blue cheese” and “buttery plump pasta,” for instance — can increase restaurant sales up to 27 percent, according to research by Brian Wansink.

Furthermore, diners feel more satisfied after eating a Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad than after eating the same salad with a blander name.

So why do these adjectives sell while others just get in the way?

Deliver real meaning.

Adjectives work when they deliver real meaning and not “the illusion of meaning without its substance.”

Roger Dooley, blogger at Neuromarketing, suggests using adjectives that are:

• Vivid. “Freshly cracked,” “light-and-fluffy,” “handcrafted,” “triple-basted” and “slow-cooked” paint pictures in the readers’ minds. Those pictures are more compelling than, say, a plain, old omelet.
• Sensory. I, for one, want my bacon applewood smoked. Descriptions like this engage the readers’ senses.
• Emotional or nostalgic. “’Aged Vermont cheddar,'” he writes, “evokes images of crusty New England dairymen rather than Kraft mega-plants.” “Boodie’s Chicken Liver Masala” and “Grandma’s zucchini cookies” also evoke emotion and nostalgia.
• Specific. “Wild Alaskan” salmon conjures up “visions of vigorous, healthy fish swimming in pristine, unpolluted streams,” he writes.  A diner can dream, can’t she.
• Branded. I strongly prefer Maytag, Stilton and Roquefort to plain old blue cheese … even though I’m not that clear on the difference.

Change the picture.

Bottom line: Sprinkle in a few adjectives when they’ll change the picture in the reader’s head or otherwise engage the senses. But don’t use modifiers — gorgeous, great, groundbreaking — that just take up space.

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