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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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.

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No punctuation transgression amuses me quite as much as the extraneous quotation mark. Because, “really,” when you inexplicably put “quotes” around a word or phrase, what is it that you’re “trying” to “say”?

Here’s how my favorite college professor tried to cure us of the offense: He’d assume that any verb with superfluous quotation marks was a euphemism for sex.

Absolutely, sir, I’d love to “talk strategy” with you this afternoon!

Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

So you can “imagine” how much I “love” Paste Production Coordinator Mark DiCristina’s “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. It documents egregious misuses of quotation marks with photos and annotates them with innuendos and other possible meanings.

Spend 20 minutes on this site, and you’ll likely be cured of superfluous quotation marks for life.

And you “know” what I mean by that.

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Paying attention to readability will help you reach readers, improve communication and boost the bottom line. It can also help you manage writers, win debates during the approval process and report measurable communication success.

Use readability statistics to:

1. Benchmark readability.

Measure the readability of the publications and websites you — and your approvers — want to emulate. We’ve benchmarked telecomm trades and defense-industry journals (including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) for you.

Use those benchmarks to set your own readability standards. And refer to those measures when approvers want to muck up your copy.

2. Measure, manage and improve communications.

Set readability standards for your group or organization, measure readability, then edit and rewrite to meet your standards.

3. Retain readability after approvals.

Tellabs’ George Stenitzer runs readability stats on every draft — “especially after reviewers have gunked them up” — to maintain his group’s readability standards.

4. Report readability.

Don’t stop with web statistics or open and clickthrough rates. Readability is another easy way to measure communication success.

“I share the results with my boss to demonstrate the impact of my work and to my clients for education,” says Susie Albrecht, director of employee communications at Charles Schwab. “My communications are more user-friendly and effective — more simple, clear and actionable.”

How else can you use readability measures in your organization?

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Want to make sure you’re not eradicating clarity in your organization?

Slaughter these problems instead, suggest Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof. They’re the authors of “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication.”

Top 3 clarity killers

According to participants in a survey by Eppler and Bischoff, the top three reasons corporate communications are hard to understand:

• Information overload. Including too many details in a communication vehicle (mean=3.61/5.0)
• Approval process. Involving too many people in creating the communication vehicle (mean=3.36/5.0)
• Death by tweakage. Inserting errors and inconsistencies and making too many changes to over time (mean=3.36/5.0)

Institutional clarity killers

These recurring managerial issues often lead to unclear communication, according to Eppler and Bischof:

• Too many cooks. The approval process results in inconsistent, overlapping and stylistically diverse messages. Example: An intranet article that’s been written by half-a-dozen “writers.” Driver: Lack of ownership. Solution: Give one owner the authority as well as the responsibility for the piece.
• Too big to fail. Everyone gets their own essential detail into the vehicle, which is now redundant, unclear and overloaded with information. Example: A marketing brochure that includes every grunt and groan about the project or service. Driver: “Iterations without consolidation.” Solution: Consolidate and redraft.
• Re-use abuse. Cut-and-paste segments are outdated, redundant and inconsistent. Example: A blog post that contains unedited paragraphs from a partner company’s website. Driver: Time. Solution: Fact-check and rewrite cut-and-paste passages.
• Swiss Army knife. Documents that attempt to serve multiple audiences but really serve none. Example: A press release for investors, journalists, community members and employees. Driver: Time and money. Solution: Divide and conquer. Write one piece, then tailor it to target audiences.

Clarity killers by project

Some topics and vehicles bring with them additional communication challenges. Are you communicating:

• The corporate vision and values? Clarity killer: Making these top-line messages abstract and generic. Simplicity solution: Add examples, stories and concrete details.
• Strategic direction? Clarity killer: Using the structure of the strategy, such as a balanced scorecard or strategy map. Simplicity solution: Develop an accessible visual metaphor for the audience, not for the creators.
• Social media? Clarity killer: Using jargon and communicating down a one-way street. Simplicity solution: Write in the language of the reader. Invite and listen to feedback.

Which of these clarity killers is your organization guilty of? How can you resuscitate clarity in your shop?

___

Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

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How can you clarify your message?

The authors of “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication” developed this CLEAR mnemonic for simplifying your subject:

1. Contextualized

The authors say: Provide the context or background of a message upfront. Who should read this and why? When and how should it be used?

Ann says: That might work for a business memo or email, but putting the blah-blah background first is hardly a compelling way to start a press release, blog post or other business story. Instead, use a feature-style story structure to:

1. Catch the readers’ attention with a compelling illustration (see “Resonating”) in the lead.
2. Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em in the nut graph.
3. Provide context in the background section.

One problem with inverted pyramids is that the context and background fall to the bottom of the pyramid. As a result, “only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories,” write the authors of “Ways with Words,” a study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and The Poynter Institute.

Here are three more ways to provide context early in your piece:

1. Call out to the intended reader in the headline by starting with the reader — “Asthma sufferers …,” “New mothers …” or “Business communicators …,” for example.
2. Add a standard label to the beginning of your subject line — “Action required,” “Response requested,” or “Deadline: 3/15,” for instance.
3. Summarize the context in the deck.

2. Logically structured

The authors say: A logical structure is needed in order to have a scaffold or support with which to process and interpret new information. Structure the message in a logical and accessible manner. What is the overall logic of the message? How do the elements build on each other?

Three structures that might work for your memos and articles:

1. SPIN: situation, problem, implications, next steps
2. Pioneer Hi-Bred’s corporate communication memo structure, developed by Mike Hall: situation, response strategy, media coverage, media strategy, standby statement to press
3. Narrative story structure: the hero’s context, the obstacle to overcome, a failed attempt, a successful attempt (climax) a resolution and a moral, or lessons learned.

Ann says: Absolutely. In addition to the feature-style story structure, a story template can make a great foundation for your piece.

3. Essential

The authors say: The cognitive load theory argues that removing irrelevant or redundant information helps communicators avoid overloading readers’ working memory.

So focus on essential elements and show them in overview before going into details. What is the most important part? What can be left out? How can it be said more simply? Too much information (information overload syndrome) can lead to mental shortcuts and confusion.

Ann says: Several things going on here:

• Find your focus. Write a walk-away sentence summarizing what you want your reader to walk away with after reading your piece.
• Leave out the rest. Remove every paragraph, sentence and word that doesn’t help you make that point. Because the more we tell people, the less they understand.
• Cut Through the Clutter. Make paragraphs, sentences, phrases and words as simple and easy to understand as possible.

As for giving audience members an overview before going into details, that works better for speeches than copy. In a written piece, use subheads and other display copy to show readers the parts.

4. Ambiguity-free

The authors say: Remove vague terms or sentences and use terms with clear, specific meanings. Could any part of the message be misunderstood? Can the message be made more specific?

Ann says: Agreed. Jargon, passive voice, noun phrases and hyperbole slow stories down and muddy messages.

I especially appreciate the authors’ suggestion to provide a short glossary of key terms in the appendix.

5. Resonating

The authors say: Use a style and format that resonates with the audience and stimulates it to engage with the content. Does the communication address the receivers directly? Are there stimulating examples, questions, illustrations, etc.?

Offer illustrative examples and visualizations, as well as stories; and use appropriate analogies or metaphors. Don’t make your message dull.

Ann says: Who could disagree with that? Surprise and delight your readers with:

• Concrete details
• Description
• Human interest
• Humor
• Metaphor
• Quotations
• Storytelling
• Wordplay

Graphic stories and other creative story formats also help engage readers.
____

Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

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I recently attended a conference where the Nielsen Norman Group unveiled its latest eyetracking research. After more than 20 years in the lab, watching people read and respond to text, they reported this finding:

“This is too easy to read.”

— Nobody ever

Literally, in decades of research, nobody has ever told them that, including highly educated domain experts.

Nobody wants it to be harder.

Some of your audience members can’t read very well, according to the latest worldwide literacy study.

But what about those who do have the skills to read easily?

But that’s not my audience.

It never fails.

When I talk in my writing workshops about the importance of making copy easy to read and understand, there’s always one person who can’t believe the advice applies to her.

“Are you kidding?” she gasps. “I’m writing to executives/pharmacists/school district superintendents/telecomm engineers/financial planners/horse breeders. These folks are superbly educated, brilliant and divine. There’s no way they’ll read anything that easy.”

So you think your audience wants it to be harder? Think again.

I’ve always argued that if you think your audience members are especially elevated or educated, then you should make your copy more readable. Executives, surgeons and other highly educated readers, after all, tend to have more stuff to read and less time to read it. So we need to make messages for those folks even easier to process.

But even if you’re writing to brain surgeons, you still want to keep your readability in check. That’s because:

1. People don’t read at their grade level. On average, high school graduates read at the 9^th grade level, according to William H. Dubay, readability consultant at Plain Language Services.^[1]

College graduates prefer to read at the 10^th-grade level, but may be willing to read information in their own fields at a higher level.

2. Reading skills decline over time. Plus, reading skills decline over time. According to the PIAAC, reading and numbers skills:

• Increased from the teenage years through the mid 40s
• Plunged some 25 points between the 40 to 54 age group and the 55 to 64 age group
• Dropped 30 more points between the 55 to 64 age group and the oldest adults

That’s partly because seniors, on average, spent fewer years in school than young people. In fact, one-third of Americans age 65 or older fall into the lowest level of prose literacy.

On average, adults read at 5 grade levels lower than the last grade they completed.

3. People don’t want to read at their grade level. People don’t want to read at their grade level.

As Douglas Mueller, president of the Gunning-Mueller Clear Writing Institute, says:

“People prefer to read and get information at a level below their capacity. Even a Harvard University professor prefers to get information without strain.”

Nobody wants it to be harder. In this environment, how do you reach real readers — those who can’t read, or just don’t want to read, at higher grade levels?

Make your message more readable. Because readability helps everyone.

Readability helps everyone

Readability helps everyone — from Harvard University professors to brain surgeons to rocket scientists. Or so says a new study by the Nielsen Norman Group.

NNG researchers started with an off-the-shelf pharmaceutical ad. You know how hard those are to read, what with all of the legalese, caveats and disclaimers. Then the researchers had two groups of people — highly literate folks and those with lower literacy — read the ads and answer some questions.

Highly literate group performs better. Unsurprisingly, in the first test, the highly literate group outperformed those with low literacy on all three measures of success:

1. Understanding. People with higher literacy understood the message better.

• The low-literacy group answered 46% of the questions right.
• The highly literate group answered 82% correctly.

2. Task time. People with higher literacy read the message faster.

• Those with low literacy took 22 minutes to read the ad.
• The highly literate group took only 14 minutes to read it.

3. Satisfaction. Nobody likes reading a pharmaceutical ad. But the low-literacy group enjoyed the experience even less than those with high literacy.

• Those with lower literacy scored their satisfaction 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.
• The highly literate group gave the experience a 3.7 out of 10.

Then the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group rewrote the ad. They used shorter sentences, shorter words and explanatory graphics to increase readability.

Highly literate perform even better. Unsurprisingly, the low literacy group performed significantly better on the more readable ad. The real surprise was that the highly literate group also performed much, much better with more readable copy.

1. Understanding. Both groups understood the clearer message better:

• The low-literacy group answered nearly half again as many questions correctly — 68%, compared to 46%. That’s a 48% increase.
• The highly literate group understood the more readable ad 13% better, answering 93% of the questions correctly, compared to 82%.

Do you really want your highly educated readers to misunderstand 13% of your message?

2. Task time. Both groups read the more readable message faster:

• Those with low literacy took only 10 minutes to read the revised ad, down from 22 minutes for the more difficult one. That’s a 55% increase in reading speed.
• The highly literate group saved nine minutes on the revised ad, finishing it in five minutes, down from 14.

That’s a 64% increase.

Give me my nine minutes back! Nobody wants to spend more time reading your message, especially not your super-busy highly literate readers.

3. Satisfaction. Even when it’s better written, nobody enjoys reading a pharmaceutical ad. But both groups preferred reading the revised message to the original:

• Those with lower literacy liked reading the revised ad 76% more, increasing their score from 2.5 to 4.4 on a scale of 1 to 10.
• The highly literate group liked reading the revised ad 30% more, boosting their satisfaction score from 3.7 to 4.8.

Remember, in all of the Nielsen Norman Group’s research, not one single person has ever wished that anything was harder to read. Repeat after me:

“My audience is not the exception.”

Nobody wants it to be harder.

So how do you make your message easier to read and understand for all of your readers, no matter what level they read at (or want to read at)?

Whether you’re writing blog posts, content marketing pieces or news releases, you can improve your Flesch Kincaid grade level scores and other readability formulas by doing two things:

1. Write short sentences: Learn how to reduce your sentence length and improve your sentence structure to make messages easier to understand.
2. Reduce word length: Learn how to reduce syllables per word and write in plain English for good readability.

Do that, and watch your writing readability text soar.

Because nobody wants it to be harder.

Learn more:

• Improve your Flesch Kincaid reading level score for more readable messages.
• Nail the Flesch Reading Ease test to make difficult-to-read copy easier to understand.
• Make any piece of text more readable by boosting readability scores.

____

Source:
^[1] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability, Impact Information, Aug. 25, 2004, p. 7

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What are the benefits of making your message measurably easier to read and understand?

Readability formulas measure how easy your message is to read based on average number of words per sentence, percentage of polysyllabic words and familiarity of words on the Dale Chall list.

Readable messages:

1. Increase reading.

Readable writing gets read, writes plain-language advocate William H. DuBay:

• Articles written at the 6th-grade level get 18% to 60% more readership than those written at the 9th-grade level, found Donald Murphy, editor of Wallaces Farmer, in a split-run test.
• Wire service stories with Flesch scores of 8th grade and below got 67% more readers than those with Flesch scores of 9th grade and above, found Bernard Feld in a readership survey.
• Local stories with Flesch scores of 8th grade and below got 75% more readers than those with Flesch scores of 9th grade and above, Feld found in that same test.

Why do the hard work it takes to increase readability? Because making your copy easier to read can convince people to read more of your message, understand it faster and remember it longer.

2. Get read more fully.

Researcher Charles E. Swanson found that:

• People read 93% more of the easy version of a story (1.3 syllables per word) than of the hard (1.7 syllables per word) version.
• Some 82% more people read the entire easy piece than read the whole hard piece.

Want to increase page view time and get more of your message across? Readability is the answer.

3. Get understood better.

When copy is easier to read, it’s also easier to understand, found researchers Curtis D. Hardyck and Lewis F. Petrinovich.

Want people to understand your message? Make it easier to read.

4. Boost reading speed, retention.

The more readable version of a training manual (7th-grade level) increased reading speed, retention and appeal over the 12th- and 16th-grade versions, found George Klare, a leading readability researcher in a study for the Air Force.

Two years later, Klare found that easy (7th- to 8th-grade) messages significantly increased reading speed and retention over hard (13th- to 15th-grade) copy in a study of 120 aviators.

Want people to read your message faster and remember it longer and enjoy it more? Boost readability.

5. Get shared more often.

The lower the reading grade level of the article headline, the more likely it is to get shared on Facebook, Zarrella’s research shows. Headlines written at the:

• 5th-grade level got shared 15% more often than average.
• 9th-grade level got shared 10% more often than average.
• 15th-grade level got shared nearly 20% less often than average.

Want your posts to travel the world instead of staying home on the couch? Make it more readable.

6. Save money, make money.

Bad writing causes 40% of the cost of managing business transactions, estimates DuBay. He cites:

• Newsletters that reach only a fraction of the targeted audience
• Press releases that never make the news
• Websites that fail to inform and motivate readers to act

“Try to imagine the costs of poor writing … in business, government, and law,” writes Joseph Kimble, chair of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Research & Writing Department. “The costs are almost beyond imagining, and certainly beyond calculating.”

Kimble goes beyond trying to imagine those costs. This lawyer/clear-writing advocate shares case studies of organizations that have saved time and money and otherwise improved business practices by making their copy easier to read.

Among them:

• Save money. FedEx saved $400,000 per year by rewriting operations manuals to make it 80% less time-consuming for users to find the information they were looking for. That doesn’t count the costs of mistakes when users couldn’t find the right answers.
• Move people to act. When the U.S. Army rewrote a memo to 129 officers, suggesting that they perform a specific task, those who got the more readable memo were twice as likely to act on the day they received it.
• Increase productivity. The U.S. Navy learned that it could save $27 million to $37 million a year in officer time by rewriting its business memos. Officers were able to read the revised memos in 17% to 27% less time.

Readable copy, Kimble writes:

• Streamlines procedures and paperwork, makes it easier to train staff, and increases staff productivity and morale.
• Reduces confusion, complaints and claims, and it improves customer satisfaction.
• Increases sales and raises the company’s standing in the marketplace.

Want to increase the ROI of your channels and boost your organization’s bottom line? Improve your readability.

How readable is your message?

To get your readability score, run your copy through a readability test like the:

• Automated Readability Index
• Coleman Liau Index
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test
• Flesch Reading Ease Formula (aka the Flesch Reading Ease Test)
• Gunning Fog Index

Is your piece too difficult to read? Reduce sentence length. Translate unfamiliar words and long words.
___

Sources: William H. DuBay, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text, Impact Information, Jan. 25, 2007

William H. DuBay, Your Stake in Plain Language (PDF), Impact Information (Costa Mesa, California), 2004

Joseph Kimble, “Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please,” May 26, 2001 — Aug. 6, 2020

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The BBC covers the most serious news known to man — West Bank stabbings, friendly fire air strikes, Justin Bieber’s bad behavior — and does so in an average of 4.7-character words.

How does your copy’s readability compare to that of the world’s largest broadcast organization?

Benchmark readability

One way to find out is to benchmark readability statistics. That’s a great way to convince bosses, clients and reviewers that extremely readable copy makes sense, even for serious messages.

We used Microsoft Word’s Readability Statistics to measure how the BBC’s readability stacks up. We analyzed every story (23, including the top 10 most read) on the BBC.com home page on a single day.

Here’s what we found out … and how you can improve readability of your own pieces.

1. The BBC’s paragraphs weigh in at an average of just 24 words, or 1.4 sentences. See how easy this 21-word paragraph looks — and is — to process:

2. The BBC’s lead paragraphs average 25 words. Write first paragraphs that go down easy like this 21-word lead from the BBC:

3. The BBC’s sentences average 19 words — a little longer than our recommended average. Model the sentences from this piece, which averaged 13.7 words per sentence:

4. The BBC averages 4.7 characters per word. This passage, for instance, weighs in at about 4.8 characters per word:

5. Of the 23 BBC articles we reviewed, only one had any passive voice. That gives the BBC an average .4% (that’s four-tenths of 1%) passive voice total. This passage, for instance, is free from passive voice:

6. The BBC averages 52.4 on this readability scale of 0 to 100. This passage hits 64.5 on the Flesch scale:

7. The world news organization weighs in at 10.63. C’mon. You can do better. This passage, for instance, hits 6.4 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale:

Benchmark readability

Benchmarking your copy’s readability can help you:

• Convince approvers that — yes, even in your business — high readability is essential and achievable.
• Set, measure and report standards for readable writing within your writing group.
• Improve readability for your own copy.

What are you waiting for? Benchmark readability in business media, industry journals, your company communications — maybe even your competitors’.

Then, no matter how serious the material, aim for standards that will help you get the word out to the most people.

Just like the BBC does.

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