What makes one message 46% easier to read and 520% more interesting? Human-interest stories.

Compare this excerpt, from Life …

… to this one, from The New Yorker:

Human interest is easier to read.

According to a measurement tool by readability expert Rudolph Flesch, The New Yorker article is easier to read:

• The New Yorker’s 18-word sentences and 1.45-syllable words, on average, give it a Flesch Reading Ease score of 66. That is very easy to read.
• Life’s 22-word sentences and 1.65-syllable words, on average, give it a Flesch Reading Ease score of 46. That means it’s 20 points harder to read.

And the second passage is also measurably more interesting:

• The Life article had zero personal words and only 11 personal sentences per 290 words. That gave it a human interest score of 7, or dull.
• The New Yorker piece had 11 personal words and 41 personal sentences. That gave it a human interest score of 53, which made it highly interesting.

No wonder news reporters rely on good human-interest stories for their news stories. Want to raise awareness for your product, program or policy? Write stories about a real-life person, group of people or other humans.

How to measure human interest.

Rudolph Flesch is famous for developing the Flesch Reading Ease, one of the most popular and widely used readability tests. It uses word length and sentence length to measure how easy your copy is to read.

Less famously, Flesch also created a formula for measuring “human interest” in your copy. It uses references to people and conversational language to measure how interesting your copy is to read. And interesting copy, Flesch said, is more readable.

“It seems hardly necessary to prove the importance of human interest … People are most interested in other people.”

— Rudolph Flesch, creator of the Flesch Reading Ease formula

“The structural shortcoming of the [Flesch Reading Ease] formula is the fact that it does not always show the high readability of direct, conversational writing,” Flesch wrote in “A New Readability Yardstick.”

So how interesting is your copy?

Run the human interest test on your copy.

To find your human interest score:

1. Count personal words. They include:

• Nouns with natural gender, such as mother, father, Frank and Opal
• Pronouns except for neuter pronouns — he and she, for instance, but not it
• The words people (used with the plural verb) and folks

2. Count personal sentences. These test how interesting and conversational the copy is. Count:

• Quotations, whether marked by quotation marks or not
• Imperative sentences, or those addressed to the reader, including questions, commands and requests
• Exclamations
• Grammatically incomplete sentences whose meaning the reader must infer from the context

3. Do the math. Figure this formula:

3.635 x % of personal words
+ 314 x % of personal sentences
= human interest score

4. Rate your message. Your score will fall between 0 (no human interest) and 100 (full of human interest). If you score:

• 0 to 10: your message is dull, like a scientific journals.
• 10 to 20: your message is mildly interesting, like business-to-business publications.
• 20 to 40: your message is interesting, like Reader’s Digest.
• 40 to 60: your message is highly interesting, like The New Yorker.
• 40 to 100: your message is dramatic, like fiction.

To increase your score, increase the number of personal words and personal sentences.

Increase readership with human interest.

Flesch earned his Ph.D. in educational research for “Marks of a Readable Style,” a dissertation that included early reading ease and interest formulas.

“Publishers quickly discovered that Flesch’s formula could increase readership by 40 to 60%,” writes William H. DuBay, a readability expert at Impact Information, in Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies.

Why not use Flesch’s lesser-known formula to increase readership of your copy, as well?

___

Sources: Rudolf Flesch, “A New Readability Yardstick,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 32. No. 3, pp. 221-233, June 1948.

Read the full text in Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies.

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