There’s nothing like noun phrases to make a tight sentence long, to transform clear, conversational language into stuffy bureaucratese:

“It is the intention of this team to facilitate the improvement of our company’s processes.”

Yet too many communicators write in noun phrases, not in verb phrases.

Why avoid noun phrases?

Noun phrases are groups of words where writers have turned verbs into nouns with latinized suffixes. Noun phrases:

1. Suck the energy out of your copy.

Noun phrases take perfectly strong verbs — verbs like “intend” and “improve” — and turn them into long, latinized nouns: “intention” and “improvement.” As a result, noun phrases suck the energy from a sentence, because only verbs can convey action.

“Much of what crosses my desk has been through the de-verb-o-rizer a few times.”

— A frustrated communicator

That’s a problem, because the human brain thinks in action, not in things or ideas. Or so says Jon Franklin, author of Writing for Story and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for feature stories:

Don’t turn action into persons, places, things or ideas.

2. Muddy your words.

Latinized nouns are almost always longer than the verbs they replace. Intention is three characters longer than intend; improvement, four characters longer than improve.

3. Lengthen your phrases.

It’s not just that noun phrases make single words longer. They also add to the length of sentences.

Noun phrases include the on one side of the nouned verb; of on the other: The improvement of. That makes a noun phrase two words longer than the original verb.

4. Bore your readers.

Noun phrases “aren’t visual and turn prose pallid,” writes science fiction author Nancy Kress. “Save them for interoffice memos.”

5. Make it seem as if you don’t understand.

As Joseph M. Williams writes in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

Avoid these “clumps of abstraction.”

Search and destroy noun phrases

How do you get the action back into noun phrases?

“Exhume the action, make it a verb, and you’re almost certain to tighten and enliven the wording.”

— Claire Kehrwald Cook, author of Line by Line

To spot and repair these sloggy phrases:

1. Search for the word “of.”

That doesn’t mean that “of” is bad or is part of a noun phrase. But virtually every noun phrase uses the “the … of” construction (“the intention of” instead of “intend,” for example.) When you find an “of” …

2. Look to the left for a latinized suffix.

Suffixes like “tion,” “ment,” “ize” or “ility” turn verbs into nouns.

3. Turn noun phrases back into verbs.

When you find a noun phrase, recast it into a verb-powered sentence. “Our team plans to help improve our company’s processes,” for instance.

The result: Strong verbs that drive your copy — and sentences that are shorter, more energetic and easier to understand.

Write for readability.

Here are four more ways to make your writing clearer and shorter:

• Activate passive voice: Don’t make your subject objects.
• Avoid adjective clauses: Hype just gets in the way.
• Steer clear of prepositional phrases: They’re hard to understand.
• Nail possessive pronouns: And other ways to write it right.

___

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

Nancy Kress, “Write Lean and Mean,” Writer’s Digest, July 2004

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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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This just in, writes one of my favorite correspondents, sharing a sentence his subject matter expert has written:

Somebody just kill me now, my friend writes.

Or, as his subject matter expert might put it, “Somebody just problem solve his way to a homicide success immediately.”

What’s wrong with this sentence? It:

• Weighs in at 30 words long
• Features 6.1-character words, on average
• Boasts 25% hard words

Worse, it’s been through the de-verb-o-rizer a few times. That’s a problem, because verbs make copy easier to read.

Verbs boost reading ease.

In 1928, Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne became the first researchers to statistically correlate writing traits with readability. They found that the more verbs in a writing sample, the easier the sample was to read. In fact, the number of verbs in a 1,000-word sample ranked No. 6 among 19 key elements that contributed to readability.

Why? Because verbs:

• Make words shorter and more recognizable. Short, familiar words rank among the top two predictors of readability, according to 70 years of research.
• Simplify sentences. Subject-verb-object is the easiest sentence structure to read and understand. And sentence length and structure is the other element most likely to predict readability.
• Reveal action. Action is easier for readers to process than things, so verbs are easier to process than nouns.

How can you mind your verbs to boost reading ease?

Reverbify nouns.

Call it verbicide: “Nominalizations” are verbs that writers have turned into nouns — “problem solved,” for instance, instead of “solved the problem.”

In 1979, attorney Robert Charrow and linguist Veda Charrow ran a test to see whether nominalizations and other “linguistic constructions” affected comprehension. They asked 35 people called for jury duty in Maryland to listen to a series of standard jury instructions, then tested participants’ understanding of what they’d heard. Then the researchers reverbified the nouns and otherwise simplified the copy and tested the instructions on a different group.

The reverbified copy was 14 percentage points easier to understand.

At least three other studies have also linked verbicide with reduced comprehension:

• E.B. Coleman and P.J. Blumenfield (1963)
• G.R. Klare (1976)
• D.B. Felkner et al (1981)

No doubt about it: When you write in verbs, you make words shorter, sentences simpler and copy brisker. This sentence, for instance, weighs in at an average of 7.0 characters per word:

This report explains our investment growth stimulation projects.

But reverbify some of those nouns, and you can bring that average down to 5.9 characters per word:

“This report explains our projects to stimulate growth in investments.”

Notice how many verbs suffocate in the nouns of my friend’s passage:

“Louisiana Station employees have problem solved their way to an XYZ Company Continuous Improvement success by purchasing a specifically designed storage cabinet to protect the life ring at the neutralization discharge pond.”

Those dying verbs make the passage thick, stuffy and hard to understand.

Zoom, zoom

Once you’ve reverbified your copy, push your verbs. Make them as strong and specific as possible.

“A story is a verb, not a noun,” wrote one of the former editors of The New York Times.That means the verb is the story. The stronger the verb, the stronger the story.

How well do your verbs tell your story?
___

Sources: William H. DuBay, “Smart Language,” Impact Information, 2007

Roy Peter Clark, “Thirty Tools for Writers,” The Poynter Institute, June 19, 2002

David Bowman, owner and chief editor of Precise Edit, “Keep Verbs as Verbs,” 300 Days of Better Writing, Sept. 24, 2010

“Break up complex sentences to help readers,” The Manager’s Intelligence Report

A Plain English Handbook (PDF), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 1998

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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?

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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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Which of these food additives is more dangerous: Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate?

Most people said the more difficult to pronounce Hnegripitrom was the most hazardous, according to a recent study by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz at the University of Michigan.

But neither is really a food additive. (In fact, neither is really a word!) So why does one seem more dangerous?

Makes me sick. People tend to rate things that are hard to pronounce as more risky than things that are easy to pronounce, according to an article in Very Evolved. (Participants in the study also rated amusement-park rides more likely to make them sick when their names were difficult to pronounce.)

This is just one more argument for choosing words that are easy to understand and easy to pronounce. It’s also another argument that the VP of Engineering’s 15-syllable words are not OK for the client newsletter.

Now that’s scary — and sickening.

‘Fluent’ words sell more.

The shorter and easier-to-pronounce your words and ideas, the more readers will respond to them, according to a new study by Princeton University psychologists Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They found that:

• “Fluently named” companies outperform hard-to-pronounce ones. A $1,000 investment in a group of stocks with easy-to-pronounce names initially yielded $112 more in profit than the same investment in a group with difficult names.
• Pronounceable ticker symbols (PER) outperformed those that were not (GTS) after a day of trading.
• People are more likely to believe a saying that rhymes (“woes unite foes”) than one that means the same thing but doesn’t rhyme (“woes unite enemies”). “What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals” is more believable than “What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks.”

Simple, easy-to-understand information often outperforms complex writing. Other studies have shown that people find “fluent,” or easy-to-process, information to be more:

• Familiar
• Intelligent
• Likeable
• True

Bottom line: People prefer the simple to the complex.

‘Fluent’ words more trustworthy.

When information is attractive and easy to understand, people are more likely to believe it’s true than if it’s unattractive and hard to understand.

Even if the statement’s false.

Studies have found that people are more likely to:

• Accept a statement printed in an easy-to-read format than when it was printed on a colored background and therefore harder to read.
• Believe a rhyming statement than a non-rhyming one. “Birds of a feather flock together,” for instance, was seen as more “true” than “birds of a feather flock conjointly.”
• Find unfamiliar graphics, like Chinese ideographs, appealing the more often they viewed them.

Familiarity breeds content. Why these results?

“We may feel that something is familiar, and, therefore, conclude that ‘there’s probably something to it,’ simply because it is easy to read,” writes Norbert Schwarz.

Schwarz is a researcher in the field of “processing fluency,” or how easy it is to understand information.

Plus, he says, the easier information is to process, the better it feels. “Again,” Schwarz writes, “we often misread this positive feeling as a result of the object’s characteristics and conclude that it is really pretty and appealing.”

The best way to make your ideas more credible: Make them easier to understand.

Simple words more trustworthy, II

Note to engineers, lawyers and management consultants: More than eight in 10 Americans are more likely to trust a company that communicates in clear, jargon-free language.

That’s according to Siegel+Gale‘s trust survey of more than 1,200 American homeowners and investors. It’s just the latest study to show that people are more likely to believe information when it’s communicated in clear, simple language.

Here are the results:

• Complexity and lack of understanding played a significant role in the current economic crisis, according to 75% of survey respondents.
• “Banks, mortgage lenders and Wall Street intentionally make things complicated to hide risks or to keep people in the dark,” according to more than 60%.
• And nearly eight in 10 called for the president to “ mandate that clarity, transparency and plain English be a requirement of every new law, regulation and policy.”

“People are desperate for clarity and simplicity in order to make informed decisions,” says Alan Siegel, founder and chairman of Siegel+Gale.

“There is a huge opportunity for government and business to overcome cynicism and regain lost trust through the way they communicate with their constituents and customers.”

Choose fluent words

People prefer words and ideas that are:

• Fluent: Short, simple and easy-to-pronounce words perform best.
• Familiar: Repeated exposure to a word, phrase or idea makes people more likely to prefer it.
• Facile: People find rhyming statements, for instance, to be more believable than those that don’t rhyme.

Words do matter. Choose yours carefully.

_____

Sources: Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz, “If It’s Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky: Fluency, Familiarity, and Risk Perception,” InterScience, July 29, 2008

“Dangerous Words,” Veryevolved.com, Feb. 9, 2009

Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, June 13, 2006

Norbert Schwarz, “On judgments of truth & beauty,” Daedalus, March 22, 2006

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