When Don Murray arrived in the newsroom for his first day on the job as writing coach for the Boston Globe, he turned to his new boss and said: “I can tell you who your three best writers are.”

NOW EAR THIS Reading your copy aloud — hearing your words instead of just staring at them — is one of the techniques that separates master writers from the might-have-beens.

Then the Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Writing to Deadline proceeded to do just that.

“How did you know?” the editor asked.

“Their lips move when they write,” Murray said.

Reading your copy aloud — hearing your words instead of just staring at them — is one of the techniques that separates master writers from the might-have-beens.

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader,” said poet Robert Frost.

Do your lips move when you write? Reading your copy aloud will make you a better writer. So perform a sound check on your copy.

Benefits of reading aloud

Listening to your copy will help you:

1. Reduce errors. Your eyes are such good editors, they can “fix” your copy as they view it. Your ears will catch what your eyes miss.

Students taking remedial writing courses at the City University of New York, for instance, eliminated 60 percent of their grammatical errors by reading their copy aloud, according to Richard Andersen, author of Writing That Works.

2. Make your copy conversational. We want our copy to sound the way we do when we speak — not like some computer spit it out. Take this sounds-the-way-you-speak passage by Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, calling attention to a great bottom line in his 2006 letter to shareholders:

“Below is the tally on our underwriting and float for each major sector of insurance. Enjoy the view, because you won’t soon see another like it.”

3. Make your copy sound better. Reading aloud can smooth out rough passages, reduce fits and starts, and otherwise make your copy flow instead of stutter. It can help you find a voice and tone for your piece.

“Effective writing has the illusion of speech without its bad habits,” Murray writes. “The reader hears a writer speaking to a reader. The writing should flow with grace, pace and clarity — not the way we speak but, better than that, the way we should speak.”

4. Cut Through the Clutter. When you read your copy aloud, your tongue will trip over nine-syllable words; you’ll run out of breath before the ends of long sentences; you’ll stumble over redundancies, jargon and passive voice.

In short, you’ll Cut Through the Clutter in your copy.

Now ear this.

“When I started reading my stories aloud for a living and I’d hear myself, I would think, ‘Good heavens, that needs to be pointed up,’ or ‘That should be out.’ Now, as I go to colleges to do readings, I have revised a lot of my early stories so that they read more succinctly. I wish I had learned early on what a good test reading aloud was.”

— Eudora Welty, American author

Find a private place and read your copy aloud. When you identify passages that need help, talk them out until you hear something that works better.

Your readers will thank you for it.

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.

When I conduct writing workshops at Tellabs, I always learn as much as I teach.

TURN STRUNK & WHITE UPSIDE DOWN Instead of omitting needless words, try highlighting needed words.

One day, watching the Tellabs team edit a press release during a practice session, I was surprised to see George Stenitzer, vice president of Corporate Communications, wielding a highlighter instead of a pencil. Instead of cutting words, phrases and ideas he wanted to remove from the piece, George was highlighting information he wanted to keep.

Forget Strunk and White. Instead of omitting needless words, why not identify needed words?

Focus on what to keep. It’s a great technique, because it focuses you on finding what you need instead of what you want to scrap. Here’s why George does it:

• “I use a highlighter to pluck a simple message from a sea of complexity.”
• “When we edit a technical paper, a highlighter helps capture its essence and translate it from technical jargon into plain language.”
• “Less is more. A highlighter is a quicker path to less.”

Give it a go. Having stolen George’s technique myself, I’ve come to believe that highlighting needed words is more effective than omitting needless words. It gets you there faster.

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.
• 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.

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

“ABC 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.”

AND ... ACTION! Has your copy been through the de-verb-o-rizer a few times? Turn nouns into verbs and watch your copy get more readable.

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:

“ABC 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

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.
• 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.

How to identify the passive voice

Do you have trouble finding and fixing the passive voice? Here are two tips for making in easier.

1. Add “by my grandma.”

If you can add “by my grandma” to the end of a sentence, it’s probably passive voice, agent deleted, says Tim Burnett, who handles Express communications at FedEx.

Example: “A nap was taken … by my grandma.”

2. Make sure the subject is doing the verb.

• Identify the verb.
• Figure out who’s doing that verb.
• Move that subject in front of the verb.

For “A nap was taken by my grandma,” ask:

• What’s the verb? Took (a nap).
• Who took the nap? My grandma.
• Move “my grandma” in front of the verb, and you’ll get “My grandma took a nap.”

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.

“If you can’t summarize your story on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear story idea.”

— R.S. Musser, professor of journalism at the University of Kansas

Decades after Ernest Hemingway famously crafted a six-word story — “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” — to settle a bet, the six-word story format has taken off:

• SMITH calls for six-word memoirs.
• The Harvard Business Review suggests summing up your leadership style in six words.
• sixwordstories.net is dedicated to publishing prose in six words. (Some are almost unbearably compelling: “Family’s tears hurt more than chemo.”)
• Harper has published Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

When my speaker e-zine announced a six-word speech contest, I had to wonder whether the six-word format had jumped the shark. Still, boiling your bigger piece down to six words is a great way to find your focus.

Can you summarize your angle in five words or less? If so, you’ve got an idea.

Cut Through the Clutter resources

Want to master the art of making all your copy clearer and more concise?

• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Bring Ann to your organization for a “Cut Through the Clutter” workshop.
• Work with Ann to Cut Through the Clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching.
• Get dozens of “Cut Through the Clutter” tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.
• Find out about Ann’s next “Cut Through the Clutter” teleseminar.
• Read Ann’s “Cut Through the Clutter” manual.
• Get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.

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

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

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

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

Less is more when it comes to:

• 401(k) plans. In a study for Vanguard, Iyengar found that for every 10 funds a company added to its options, the number of employees enrolling dropped by 2 percent.
• Medicare plans. When seniors had to choose a Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2006, they were overwhelmed by the options. In the end, some 10 percent of seniors didn’t enroll by the deadline, even though it meant they’d have to pay extra to enroll late.
• Accountants and emergency room doctors also make better decisions with less information.

What’s wrong with choice?

Making a choice takes three mental tasks, Iyengar says:

• Figuring out what you want
• Understanding the options
• Making tradeoffs

This exercise becomes more complex as the choices multiply.

So how can you make it easier for your readers to make a decision — instead of giving up and going home?

Think in decision layers.

One way is to try the three-by-three rule: Offer a matrix of three categories, each with three options. Instead of deciding between nine options, readers make two decisions between three options each.

TRIPLE WHAMMY: A three-by-three matrix makes it easier for readers to decide.

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.

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

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants prosecutors in his federal corruption trial to play all 500 hours of the FBI’s secretly recorded tapes of his conversations.

“Of course,” I thought when I heard the news. “He’s practicing AKK.”

AKK is The New York Times’ acronym for “all known knowledge.” That’s where — instead of carefully sifting through the information on your topic and building a cogent argument out of it — you dump all that information on your audience members and let them sort it out.

AKK doesn’t inform people; it just numbs them.

And that’s what Blagojevich’s defense team is counting on: burying jurors under so much information that they can’t think. (This is also known as the “That document you requested is somewhere in this semi truck filled with paper” defense.)

Unlike Blagojevich, you actually want to help your audience members understand your topic. So your job isn’t to forward AKK; your job is to find a tight story angle on the topic and communicate it efficiently.

Except when you don’t want them to understand. And then, by all means, drown your audience members in data.

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.

My friends at TELLABS write brisk, interesting message statements — in 23 words or less.

Using message map guidelines from Tripp Frohlichstein, president of MediaMasters, they write one key message and three supporting points, like this:

“Tellabs innovates to help customers succeed — by cutting costs, generating revenue and improving the user experience.”

The resulting 23-words-or-less message translates into about seven seconds when spoken, says George Stenitzer, vice president of Corporate Communications for TELLABS. That’s the length of an average sound bite in the news media.

I thought of this formula when I read an airline’s 27-word strategy and core business message:

“AIR FRANCE KLM’s strategy can be expressed as: one Group, two Airlines, and three Core Businesses. KLM’s core businesses are passenger transport, cargo shipment, and aircraft maintenance.”

Short. Sweet. Neat.

How could you improve your message statements by adhering to a tight word count?

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.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Joseph M. Williams, the author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, wrote:

“The ability to write clear, crisp sentences that never go beyond twenty words is a considerable achievement.”

Jack Hart, editor at large of The Oregonian and author of A Writer’s Coach, counsels:

“Writers who demand attention seldom average more than 17 words a sentence.”

Jack Cappon, longtime Associated Press editor and writing ace, said:

“There are no absolute rules of good writing — generalizations are instantly riddled with exceptions — but the principle of the 16-word average sentence comes closest. No other single step you can take will show such quick results in clarity and vigor.”

Tom Silvestri, president of Media General Community Newspapers, suggests:

“Imagine a clock that starts ticking after the 10th word. With each additional word, the ticking gets louder. After the 20th word, the ticking is VERY loud. After the 40th, it’s stadium-crowd loud. After 45, deafening.”

When does your sentence-length alarm go off? If you want to write copy that readers find easy to read and understand, keep sentences short.

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.

___

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

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

by Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc.

“The dirtiest four-letter word in the English language: read.”

— Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics website

Is your copy easy to read?

According to communication experts, that’s one of the two key questions people ask to determine whether to read a piece — or whether to toss it.

Here are four tips for crafting copy that’s clear and concise. Because the easier your copy is to read, the more people will read it.

1. Google clearer definitions.

Need to define a technical term in clear, easy-to-understand language?

Google can help.

Just type “define: term” in the search box. You’ll get a list of definitions for your term on the Web.

2. Think packages, not pieces.

No doubt about it: Your readers would rather read a short piece than a long piece.

One good way to reduce the length of your copy is to focus each piece on a single message point. You say you have six messages? Then you have six pieces —not one long, unwieldy piece.

That’s what we call “redirection,” or breaking your story into multiple pieces. In addition to your main story, you might repackage your piece into:

• Sidebars
• Boxes
• Lists
• Related stories
• Web sidebars
• Freestanding vignettes
• Fun facts, trivia or other marginalia

You might even consider serializing your story, or breaking your piece into short chapters or segments to run over time.

3. Vary paragraph length.

Readers make an at-a-glance decision about your copy based on visual cues. Paragraph length is among the most important signals you send to readers about how easy and interesting your copy is to read.

If your paragraphs are too thick, the story looks slow and off-putting, for example. And if they’re all the same length, the story can feel monotonous, says Jacqui Banaszynski, assistant managing editor at The Seattle Times. She holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

So how do you know?

Print your copy out in columns and eyeball it, Banaszynski advises. If your paragraphs all look the same, you’re probably not getting enough rhythm into your piece.

In that case, recast some paragraphs to vary their length.

4. Activate the passive voice.

The passive voice adds to our word count, saps the energy from sentences and makes it look like we’re trying to avoid pinning the blame on anyone. Here are three ways to activate the passive voice:

• Identify passive sentences —and get suggested rewrites —via Microsoft Word’s grammar check. It’s fine to do this, but a pro can spot the passive without tech support. Which brings us to …

• Understand the passive voice. Many writers, confused about the passive voice, believe every sentence that contains a form of the verb “to be” is passive. Not so. A sentence is passive only when it uses the object-verb-subject or object-verb structure. Otherwise, it’s just a sentence with a weak verb.

• Search for the words “was” and “by.” The “was …” or “was … by” construction is a clue to the passive voice.

Once you find passive sentences, activate the passive voice. Your sentences should explain who did what to whom.

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.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2006 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.