As good as your word

Against the law

Boil down your boilerplate

Take the (other) Flesch test

Make your copy measurably more interesting

Can you measure how interesting your copy is? Readability expert Rudolph Flesch believed that you can.

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.

“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.”

The original readability formula, Flesch wrote, “consistently rates the popular Reader’s Digest more readable than the sophisticated New Yorker magazine, although many educated readers consider the Reader’s Digest dull and the sprightly New Yorker ten times as readable.”

So how interesting is your copy?

Run the human-interest test on your copy.

Flesch’s human interest score hinges on two measures:

1. 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. 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

The higher the percentage of personal words and personal sentences, the higher the human interest score.

Which is more interesting?

In one application of his formula, Flesch analyzed articles from Life and The New Yorker that covered the same topic.

Excerpts from Life article (Oct. 27, 1947)

Excerpts from The New Yorker article (Oct. 25, 1947)

“Using better drugs and a wider knowledge of the mechanics of pain gained during and since the war, Doctors E. A. Rovenstine and E. M. Papper of the New York University College of Medicine have been able to help two-thirds of the patients accepted for treatment in their ‘pain clinic’ at Bellevue Hospital.“The nerve-block treatment is comparatively simple and does not have serious aftereffects. It merely involves the injection of an anesthetic drug along the path of the nerve carrying pain impulses from the diseased or injured tissue to the brain. Although its action is similar to that of spinal anesthesia used in surgery, nerve block generally lasts much longer and is only occasionally used for operations.”

“… Recently, [Rovenstine] devoted a few minutes to relieving a free patient in Bellevue of a pain in an arm that had been cut off several years before. The victim of this phantom pain said that the tendons ached and that his fingers were clenched so hard he could feel his nails digging into his palm. …”‘One of my greatest contributions to medical science has been the use of the eyebrow pencil,’ he said. He took one from the pocket of his white smock and made a series of marks on the patient’s back, near the shoulder of the amputated arm, so that the spectators could see exactly where he was going to work. … The patient’s face began to relax a little. ‘Lord, Doc,’ he said. ‘My hand is loosening up a bit already.’ ‘You’ll be all right by tonight, I think,’ Rovenstine said. He was.”

I find The New Yorker passage much more interesting than the Life passage. But exactly how much more interesting is it, and why? According to Flesch’s human interest test, the New Yorker piece is 757 times more interesting:

• With 0 personal words and 11 personal sentences per 290 words, the Life article scores a 7, or “dull.”
• With 11 personal words and 41 personal sentences, the New Yorker piece gets a score of 53, or “highly interesting.”

Is your copy dull — or highly interesting?

To make it more engaging, increase your human interest score.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Read more: Get the full text of Rudolf Flesch’s “A New Readability Yardstick” (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 32. No. 3, June 1948) in William H. DuBay’s Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies (PDF).
• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to make your copy more creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

‘Solution’ strikes again

‘Pet waste removal service’ scoops up worst buzzword

“Solution,” according to the Gable Group’s late, great Jargonator, is one of the most overused buzzwords of the day:

“Companies used to sell products, now they sell solutions. Dog food bowls are pet-feeding solutions, chairs are sitting solutions, cars are transportation solutions.”

Now you can add to that list Shadoobies, the dog poop solution.

Is there a solution to the “solution” problem? What word would you use instead? One approach: Focus on benefits instead of features. How about “Never scoop dog poop again”?

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Take me there

Observational stories put readers in the scene

For his latest book, Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee:

• Rode from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a 65-foot, 18-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats
• Attended ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in 20-foot scale models
• Traveled by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways that Henry David Thoreau navigated in a homemade skiff in 1839

To get their stories, other writers have journeyed with a teenage boy from the Honduras to North Carolina to find his mother, eaten nothing but Big Macs for a month and traveled cross-country with Einstein’s brain.

When it comes to description, there’s nothing like being there. And there’s nothing like taking your reader to the scene through observational stories.

For an observational story, you go on an adventure, then recreate that experience in a collection of scenes for your reader.

Make mine short.

Most of us don’t have the rest of our lives to research a story. But you don’t have to drive Einstein’s brain around America to pull this story form off.

You can research an observational story in:

• One day. As an editorial assistant for Folio: magazine, Steve Wilson once spent 14 hours hanging out at a Manhattan bookstore to write an observational story about how people looked at magazines.
• Half a day. Wilson’s previous job was tougher: He tested rain gear for another magazine by going through a car wash on foot nine times. (Even I have never asked an writer to get pressure-washed and sprayed with hot wax more than eight times.)
• A few hours. I once turned a profile of a personal nutritionist into an observational story by having her give my pantry a makeover (she discovered a Chef Boyardee pizza mix from 1989), then going grocery shopping with her.
• Two hours or less. A friend who works for H&R Block tries out the company’s tax software before writing an observational pitch about it.

Road trip

For a profile of a Farmland Industries CEO, I once spent a day with Harry Cleberg touring the Kansas City Farmland facilities. Rather than a traditional profile, I used vignettes from the road to reveal Cleberg’s character in little glimpses, as it had been revealed to me. Here’s the lead:

“His desk sits in the corner office of Farmland Industries’ headquarters building in North Kansas City, but Harry Cleberg’s heart is here: among the 50-pound bags of fertilizer, soybean seed and milk replacer for calves at the Central Cooperative Inc. in Adrian, Mo.

“He gossips and teases, chatting with owner Ben Griffith and manager Owen Highly about the height of corn in Colby, Kan., and how much milo got planted before this early-June rain turned the fields into muck.

“’How many people work at a local co-op?’ he asks the staff at large, scooping a fistful of dried molasses out of a bag and offering me a taste of the feed sweetener.

“’About half!’ he answers with a squeal, his eyebrows jutting like exclamation points from his wire-rimmed glasses. And Owen and Roger and Chuck, gathered around to shoot the breeze on this grizzly morning with Harry — Harry, just plain Harry, none of this ‘Mr.’ stuff for him — bust out laughing, too.”

Granted, I’m no McPhee. But I did wind up with a much livelier story because of the time I spent in the field.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of tipsheets on creative copywriting at RevUpReadership.com.

Can you read me now?

21% of U.S. adults have trouble using a street map

What reading grade level should you hit on the Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog or other readability indexes?

If you’re writing for a broad audience, you might consider starting with eighth on the Flesch-Kincaid test. Ratchet up or down from there depending on your audience members’ sophistication.

Why so low?

In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education conducted the first National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the most comprehensive, statistically reliable source on literacy in the United States. It studied 26,000 U.S. adults, representing 191 million people.

Three literacy scales. The study looked at:

• Prose literacy — the ability to search, understand and use information from linear copy, like articles.
• Document literacy — the ability to search, understand and use information from nonlinear materials, like maps.
• Quantitative literacy — the ability to identify and perform computations using numbers from printed material.

The results? Nearly half of the Americans surveyed weren’t literate enough to read a sports article and identify the age at which the swimmer began swimming competitively, according to “Adult Literacy in America” (pdf), a report based on that study.

Light reading

Percentage of U.S. adults who can read at different estimated grade levels,
according to the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS)

Calculate readability

Since 1847, scholars and others have been measuring how hard copy is to read. Over the years, these folks have created some 200 readability indexes — from the Flesch to the Fry, from the Fog to the SMOG, from the Spache to the LIX.

All of these indexes boil readability down to a mathematical formula. Those formulas usually comprise two factors:

• Sentence length. This measures “syntactic,” or structural, difficulty. Most formulas measure the average number of words per sentence.
• Word length. This measures “semantic,” or meaning, difficulty. Most formulas measure the average number of syllables or characters per word.

One way to measure your copy’s readability is to use STORYtoolz readability statistics. Just enter your message, and STORYtoolz will run it through seven popular indexes. You’ll find out all kinds of fascinating details about your piece, from the number of characters per word to how often you use the passive voice.

To improve your reading grade level, just reduce the length of your sentences and words. Your readers will be glad you did.

Improve readability

Worried about talking down to your audience? Don’t. Most audience members — even brain surgeons and rocket scientists — are tired, busy and overwhelmed with information. They’ll be happy to get your copy in a more digestible package.

Keep in mind that the front page of The Wall Street Journal is written at the ninth-grade level. This piece, which I wrote for a highly literate audience — you! — weighs in at the eighth grade reading level, according to Flesch-Kincaid.

How much harder would you like it to be?

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Can Web heads be witty and wise?

5 ways to write for Google and people

When The Washington Post ran an article about Conan O’Brien’s refusal to accept a later time slot on NBC, the original, print headline said:

“Better never than late”

The Web version:

“Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot
to make room for Jay Leno”

That’s what happens when writers optimize headlines for Google. We move proper nouns, keywords and full names to the front of the headline, crowding out wit and whimsy.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are five ways to work around the restrictions of Web heads:

1. Write two heads.

Put the literal, search- and click-friendly headline on the content page. Place a feature headline on your own homepage or sub-indexes.

2. Use your title tag and URL.

Your title tag gets more Google juice than your Web headline. So put your literal headline in the title tag and put the feature headline on the content page. The New York Times, for instance, sometimes packs keywords into its title tags, but not into the page headline.

3. Use your URL.

Your URL also gets more Google juice than your Web headline. So put your literal headline in the URL and put the feature headline on the content page. The New York Times also uses the URL, but not the page headline, for keywords.

4. Use the deck.

You could also use the headline for the literal story, the deck for the creative or benefits-focused one.

• Literal headline: [Topic word] does what
• Benefits-oriented deck: You benefit how
• Creative deck: Clever wordplay or twist of phrase

5. Be witty and clear.

You’re brilliant, right? Why not write a headline that’s both creative and telling? The pros are pulling it off by writing:

• A literal kicker with a clever headline. “Witty headlines: Black and white and dead all over,” writes corporate communicator Kevin Allen.
• A topic word subject with a clever verb phrase. “Meteor Impact Theory Takes a Hit,” writes a Wired copyeditor. And a Kansas City Business Journalwriter comes up with “Mutual of Omaha Bank will deposit full-service branch in Kansas City.”

Granted, there’s no danger that readers will injure themselves in a laughing fit over these headlines, but these writers do manage to make their Web heads both literal and creative.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web-writing learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

I only have eyes for you

Magazines dominate usage 85% of the time

You might talk on the phone while reading online, but when you read a magazine, you read a magazine.

Print is more engaging than TV, radio and the Web, according to researchers at Ball State University.

Electronic media — the Internet, TV and radio — garner a greater share of the time people spend with media. But people often treat those media as background noise, researchers found. They drive and text while listening to the radio, for instance, or eat and chat while watching TV.

Magazines: the unsocial media channel

But 85 percent of the time, when people read magazines, they don’t do anything else. That places magazines on top of the list of media channels with the greatest share of primary usage. The Web comes in last; people use it as their primary medium less than half the time.

Do you take advantage of all of your media options when planning your communications?

Plan powerful communications.

Want to master the art of effective communication planning?

• Get expert advice: Bring Ann in to help you adopt a strategic editorial approach.
• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a write or edit copy that helps your organization achieve its business objectives.
• Boost your own skills: Work with Ann to improve your strategic writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching.
• Learn more: Study Ann’s communication planning learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of communication planning tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

___

Source: Joe Mandese, ”Study Cracks Code, Finds Print May Be More Engaging Than TV, Radio, Web,” Media Daily News, Jan. 27, 2006

Boil it down

Explain ‘About us’ in your boilerplate

Boilerplates: Can’t live without ’em, can’t get a decent one through approvals.

A boilerplate is the short “About us” paragraph at the end of your releases that describes your organization.

It’s the boilerplate’s ubiquitousness that makes it important. Your boilerplate gets used over and over again. Depending on the scope and reach of your media relations efforts, your boilerplate could be posted and published thousands and thousands of times — and read by millions and millions of people.

Some PR pros argue that that makes the boilerplate the most important paragraph in your organization.

The problem is, too many PR boilerplates are far too long, too broad and too fluffy to be very useful.

Include just the facts, ma’am.

What goes into a good boilerplate?

To decide, think like a reader. Ask, “What would a journalist or blogger need to know to define my company in an article or post?”

For the most part, you’ll want to stick to the 5 W’s. You might want to include:

WHOM you help. AllianceBernstein’s boilerplate, for instance, says, “For over 40 years, AllianceBernstein Investments, Inc., … has helped investors …”

WHAT you make or do. AllianceBernstein: ” … by providing innovative investment solutions from a diverse line of investment vehicles including mutual funds, college savings (529) plans, retirement products and separately managed accounts.”

WHERE you’re located. Olympic Paints and Stains, for instance, mentions that the company is based in Pittsburgh.

WHERE readers can find you online. Create inbound links for your website. To optimize your boilerplate for news portals:

• Link your company name to your home page
• Include the URL in parentheses after your company name

Example:

“Wylie Communications Inc. (http://www.WylieComm.com) …”

Learn more about why this approach works.

WHY you’re an industry leader. Don’t just call yourself a leader. Deliver a compelling proof point.

Rosetta Stone’s boilerplate, for instance, says, “Teaching 29 languages to millions of people over 150 countries …” and “For the second year in a row, Fairfield Language Technologies is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Virginia as ranked by Deloitte and Touche.”

And Tellabs’ boilerplate offers this proof point: “… 43 of the top 50 global communications service providers choose our mobile, optical, business and services solutions.”

Other details to consider. You might also include:

• Your stock ticker symbol, if applicable.
• The year you were founded, if notable. American Express, for instance, notes that it was founded in 1850. Wylie Communications, on the other hand, doesn’t mention that it was founded in 1996.
• Your size in annual revenues; assets under management; number of employees, clients, members, outlets or products sold; or other measures that makes sense for your organization.

Reach bloggers, journalists and readers.

Want to deliver successful media relations pieces?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a PR writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a PR writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to improve your PR writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Anatomy of a News Release 2.0 webinar.
• Learn more: Study Ann’s Anatomy of a Release, Pitch and E-mailed Release toolkit. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of advanced PR writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

« Previous Page — Next Page »