Model physicist Richard Feynman’s piece
So you think your subject is complex? Try taking on the topic of nanotechnology.
That’s the subject of “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics,” a classic speech by Richard Feynman, one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century.
Study it — then steal his approaches for making even physics more accessible. Among them:
1. Use concrete examples from the audience member’s world.
“Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?” Feynman asks.
2. Use familiar words.
Of the nearly 7,000 words in Feynman’s talk, my spell-checker tripped over only a handful. Most were people’s names. The others: “demagnify,” “carotenoids” and “microsome.” That’s .04 percent of the total number of words.
3. Use short words.
Feynman’s words averaged 4.4 characters each. That’s well under my recommendation of no more than 5 characters on average.
4. Make reading easy.
Feynman’s piece weighs in at the ninth grade level according to the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index. (I recommend keeping this score in the single digits.) And it scores an amazing 62.5 percent on Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease index. (I recommend aiming for 50 on this one.)
In short, Feynman’s piece is much easier to read than virtually all of the business communications I review.
How does your copy — regardless of the topic — stack up against Feynman’s?
Start making sense
Get the gobbledygook, jargon and gibberish out
Jargon. Buzzwords. Acronyms. They’re things that make your reader go “huh?” And we need to get them out of our message.
Indeed, jargon irritates your reader, makes your message less understandable, reduces your social media reach and influence, cuts your chances of media coverage, makes your website harder to find and demonstrates your lack of knowledge about the topic. It may even suggest that your company is in trouble.
Translate the language of your organization into the language of your readers.
At Cut Through the Clutter — our in-house clear-writing workshop — you’ll learn how to:- Determine when to use jargon to streamline communication — and when to avoid it at all costs.
- Run a simple test to decide which terms to use with industry insiders.
- Turn Google into the best thesaurus ever.
- Define terms the reader-friendly way (Hint: It’s not the way we learned to do it in Journalism 101.)
- Steal techniques from Warren Buffett to make complex technical information easier to understand — and more fun to read.
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