Half of U.S. adults read at basic level or below
Let’s start with the bad news: More than half of American adults have basic or below basic prose skills, according to the Department of Education’s latest literacy test.… Read the full article
Concise Writing
Turn populations into people
Help readers see a classroom of children
Compare the impact of this statement …’
“Each day, we lose 30 children to gun violence.”
… to the impact of this one:
“Each day, we lose a classroom of children to gun violence.”
The cost of bad writing
It’s a $37 million-a-year problem at one organization
Bad writing causes 40% of the cost of managing business transactions, writes William H. DuBay, a readability expert at Impact Information, in Working with Plain Language (PDF).… Read the full article
Search and destroy conjunctions
And, Or and So can increase sentence length
Sentences too long? Use Microsoft Word’s “find” function to search for conjunctions. They include:
- And
- Or
- Also
- But
- So
- Then
- Plus
When one of my writing coachees tried this trick, she found 23 “and’s” in a 500-word article.… Read the full article
‘Dear Mother’
Write a letter to make your copy conversational
“Good writers are visible just behind their words.”
— William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well
Eliot Fette Noyes was a Harvard-trained architect and industrial designer.… Read the full article
Less is more
The longer your piece, the less readers will read
Size does matter.
The longer your story, the less of it your readers will read — and the less likely they are to understand and act on it.… Read the full article
CEO pay disclosures ‘like reading War and Peace’
Proxies long and mind-numbing
So much for the SEC’s new rules requiring companies to write more clearly about executive compensation.
This year’s compensation discussion and analysis (CD&A) sections — the first crop created under the new SEC mandate — are almost impossible to read.… Read the full article
Why is clarity so important?
6 myths of complicated copy
Why make copy clearer and more readable?
In “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” two researchers at the University of St.… Read the full article
No. 1 way to increase readership
Make your message easier to read
Making a publication “easy to read” is the No. 1 way to increase readership.
If newspapers (and, by extension, other publications) become more “relaxing to read” and make it easier “to find what I’m looking for,” people will:
- Spend more time reading the publication
- Read it more completely
- Read it more often
That was a key finding of “Impact,” a study by the Readership Institute.… Read the full article
How does story length affect readability?
Shorter stories 6% more readable — Readership Institute
All things else being equal, readers would rather read a short piece than a long one.
But all things are never really equal.… Read the full article