4 steps to Cutting Through the Clutter
You’ve prewritten and freewritten your message. Now it’s time to rewrite it.
Here’s where you’ll edit, hit readability targets, and nail spelling, grammar and punctuation.… Read the full article
Readability
What’s the best email readability?
Aim for the 3rd grade reading level
How easy should email newsletters and e-blasts be to read? Very easy, according to a study of more than 40 million emails by Boomerang.… Read the full article
Writer centered vs. reader centered writing
Stop We-We-ing on reader
It feels so good to talk about ourselves.
Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read the full article
Use WIIFM communication for news release leads
Move from event to impact to engage readers
Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.
Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper.… Read the full article
World technology literacy skills: bad and getting worse
21% of adults are technologically illiterate
Just 7% of adults around the world can manage conflicting requests to reserve a meeting room using a reservation system, then email people to let them know whether they got the room they requested.… Read the full article
Write like Churchill — in one-syllable words
‘Short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all’
What do you notice about this passage, excerpted from an article in The Economist?… Read the full article
How to hit the best word length for blog posts, other content
Choose Anglo-Saxon words, write to ‘you’ & more
More than 80 years of readability research demonstrate that short words are easiest to read and understand.… Read the full article
What is word length, and why should you care?
Short words No. 1 predictor of readability
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry spent eight years teaching businesspeople how to write better. As he told Time magazine:
“I’d lecture a bunch of chemists or engineers about the importance of not saying ‘It would be appreciated if you would contact the undersigned by telephone at your earliest possible convenience,’ and instead saying ‘Please call me as soon as you can.’
… Read the full articleWhat’s the best length of a word online?
The New York Times averages 4.9 characters
An editor once counseled me to change all the instances of employment in an article to jobs.
Great advice.… Read the full article
Measure, manage & report readability
4 more ways to use reading ease
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.… Read the full article