Are You Smarter Than a 7th Grader? When Writing, Maybe You Shouldn't Be

A popular TV show asks adults if they are smarter than 5th graders. The assumption is they should be.

When it comes to writing for the general public, maybe that's wrong—by a couple of grades, or three.

Studies in the U.S. show that the average American reads at the grade 7-9 level. I have no reason to believe it is any different in Canada.

Newspapers know this; they are typically written to the grade nine level.

Popular novels by people like John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Stephen King are written at the grade seven level.

Romance novels are written at the grade five level.

Thoughts about reading levels came to mind last week when a well-respected Canadian NGO sent me a press release.

It wasn’t easy to read. It had long sentences and paragraphs, and lots of  big and complex words.

Curious, I put it through a readability test. Sure enough, it wasn’t just me: It got a grade level of 18, or “very difficult to read.”

In order to understand it, you’d need to be a college graduate, or above.

Which is fine, if this organization is targeting college graduates. But since it aims to serve and reach the general public, it has a problem.

It’s tempting to get all in a huff and decry the state of literacy today. But that won’t get us anywhere.

It’s much better to write so that people can read and understand what we are trying to say—especially if we want to enlist their support for our important causes.

Better to remember the advice of George Orwell: Never use a long word if a short one will do. Or Mark Twain, who said the following to a young boy seeking advice about writing:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; and don't let the fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”

Twain’s books, by the way, are written at a fifth-grade level. He didn’t do so bad.

This post, by-the-way, comes in at between grades 5-7, or very easy to read. 

Here are some websites where you can check the readability your organization’s press releases and other materials:

Readabilityscore.com 

Readability Formulas 

For further reading:

Education Expert Says College Freshmen Read at the Grade Seven Level 

American High School Students Are Reading Books At5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels: Report

Know Your Readers (Plain Language Network) 

Death of the Home Page

Newspaper editors spend a lot of time deciding what goes on the front page. Which articles are the most important? Which ones to highlight top of fold?

The same amount of effort is put into their home pages on the Web. But research shows that it’s mostly in vain.

According to an article in the May, 2014 Atlantic Online, the New York Times—one of the premiere online news websites—lost 80 million visits to its home page between 2011 and 2013.

It’s not that people stopped reading the Times online; they just stopped going to the home page to start their reading journey.

In place of the home page, they entered the newspaper’s website through direct links to articles on the site.

And how did they get to those pages? Through referring sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

In other words, once upon a time editors decided what articles were the most important news of the day.

Today, readers make that decision. What editors think isn’t as important as what their friends think.

The New York Times responded by redesigning its home page to make it more appealing and useful to readers, to reflect what they wanted and were looking for.

What does this mean for non-profit groups?

We will never have the stature or reach of the New York Times. But, like the Times, our home pages aren’t the only entry point to our websites—they might not even be the most important entry point.

So while our home pages need to look good and be easy to use, we don't need to agonize over them. 

In the end, it’s more about what’s on our websites that matters: The content. 

The Communications Revolution in One Comic Strip

Does anything else need to be said?

Gutengoogle, or the Future of Communication

In 1979 Elizabeth Eisenstein decided to research the history and impact of the printing press.

To her surprise, she discovered there was a lot of information about life in the early 1400s—the era before the invention of the printing press.

And there were endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after the full impact of Gutenberg’s invention was being felt.

What she could not find was very much information about the 100 years in between, when the printing press was introduced.

And so she wondered: What was life like in that period?

In her resulting book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Eisenstein writes that it was a chaotic, uncertain and challenging time, a time when whole industries and jobs were rendered obsolete and new ones were created.

it was a lot like today, in other words.

The big difference between the printing press revolution then, and the digital revolution now, is the speed at which the change is occurring. 

It won’t take 100 years this time.

But the results are the same—uncertainty, lost jobs and disappearing industries.

While things are changing, those of us who work in communications and the media are desperately trying to keep up.

Conferences are held. Papers are written. Predictions are made.

Academics theorize and practitioners experiment.

Everyone is looking for the next big thing.

But figuring out what to do is an almost impossible task says Clay Shirky, one the leading thinkers about the impact of the Internet on the world today.

Reflecting on the nature of today’s digital revolution, Shirky says: 

“During revolutions, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

The hard truth for everyone living in such a time, he says, is that there are no certainties—nobody “knows for sure what will happen” in the future.

Except maybe for one thing: Print is no longer going to be the main way people share information.

But what will take its place? Something online, for sure. But what will that look like? And how will it be paid for?

I have no idea. 

Right now, we're caught in between the worlds of Gutenberg and Google, like the people and institutions in Eisenstein's book.

We live in a world of Gutengoogle, or maybe a Googleberg. 

We're looking back and looking forward, not knowing what comes next, and worried about what is being lost.

Then again, people caught in Gutenberg’s revolution didn’t know how things would turn out, either.

They just had more time to adjust. 

When Facts & Beliefs Collide: What Non-Profits Can Learn from the Disney Measles Outbreak

The outbreak of measles traced to Disneyland has prompted a furious debate about vaccinations. It's a debate non-profit groups can learn from.

Even though proponents say the science is pretty clear about the safety of vaccines, people who fear them aren't buying it.

For every research paper or set of facts trotted out by experts, doctors and researchers, anti-vaxxers tell stories of kids who they say were damaged by vaccinations.

Nobody is giving a bit of ground.

But not only is the science-based approach not working, it's making opponents of vaccines even stauncher in their opposition.

That's what research from Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler shows. According to the study, a facts-based approach can make people hold those beliefs even more strongly.

Why is that? According to researchers, it's about self-preservation.

“When your sense of self and your worldview are challenged, you need to have a defense mechanism in place," said Reifler.

"It’s much easier to say ‘This information is wrong’ than to say, ‘How I view the world turned out not to be correct.’”

Don Braman of George Washington University is part of the Cultural Cognition Project, which studies how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs.

In an interview on NPR, he said that it's hard for people to accept a new way of seeing things if it conflicts with their cultural, friendship, peer or religious group.

He gave the example of a barber in a rural town in South Carolina. 

If the barber implored his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change, he might not only be ridiculed, he might lose all his friends and customers and be out of a job.

The cost of taking action for him is just too high.

For non-profit organizations, this debate about vaccines, beliefs and facts is instructive.

Like those who are pro-vaccines, we often use facts to try to convince people about the urgency or rightness of our positions.

And when people don't change, we pour on more facts and figures.

Soon, it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. It only frustrates us and annoys the listener.

So what to do?

One approach is what is known as the messenger effect, otherwise known as finding a champion.

What the messenger effect shows is that people are more receptive to new and challenging information if it comes from someone they know and respect.

What does this mean for non-profits?

For groups fighting climate change, it means that a farmer in western Canada is more apt to hear out another farmer on the subject—not a Toronto-based urban environmentalist.

Likewise, for groups trying to reach religious people, it means using someone from their own denomination or faith community who can use their own scriptures and traditions—not using information from a secular body or a non-believer.

It's about finding the right people, in other words, not just sharing the right information.

When someone we know tells us how they changed their mind, or why they believe what they do, we are more apt to take them seriously. 

As American diplomat Ralph Bunche said: "If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in person."

I don't know if this will have any effect on the vaccination debate. But it might help your non-profit communicate better with the public.

Read more about this subject in the New York Times. 

  

Of Peanut Butter, the Super Bowl and Heart-Felt Storytelling

As Mike Duerksen notes on his blog, Super Bowl advertisers went for the heart this year.

Overall, says Mike, the "ads featured an overwhelming dose of humanity—something cause marketers should pay close attention to.”

Since these are the most expensive ads on broadcast TV each year, what the advertisers chose to focus on tells you “what advertisers think people will respond to,” he adds.

“And when the biggest ad showcase of the year focuses on heart-felt storytelling rather than product features and benefits, we need to listen up.”

This isn’t the first time advertisers have focused on heart-warming storytelling.

In April, last year, the Globe and Mail carried an article about how advertisers are changing tactics to reach millennial moms.

The article focused on how Kraft Canada launched a rebranding of its iconic peanut butter.

Peanut butter is still one of Kraft’s best sellers, but its all-important advertising target market—millennials—isn’t buying as much.

For a few years now, the Globe reported, “marketers have recognized the importance of speaking to this younger cohort of digitally-savvy people.”

But now that millennials are starting to have kids of their own, “this consumer segment is posing a new challenge for companies that have to figure out how to communicate with a new generation of moms.”

The new Kraft rebranding is an attempt to do just that.

It shows a mother giving a teddy bear to her baby; as the baby grows, she takes her bear with her everywhere. Eventually, she becomes a mother herself and her baby gets a bear as well.

The ad purposefully includes very few shots of the product itself or the brand name. It is focused much more on the emotional story.

“Companies that will win in the future are those that humanize their brands,” Leisha Roche, senior director of marketing for grocery brands at Kraft Canada, told the Globe.

“You can’t just push your brand any more.”

Why not? Because people have so many sources of information, and so many brands competing for their attention, that they are tuning it all out.

In order to attract attention, the article went on to say, companies need to share “human content all the time.”

According to Katherine Wintsch, founder and chief executive officer of The Mom Complex, a consulting firm that helps clients market to mothers, the typical ad is a woman talking to the camera “about her cleaning products. It’s tutorial, and boring, and they react against that.”

There’s a lesson here for non-profits. Too often we just share important facts and figures with people—so many poor, so many hungry, so much inequality, so little clean air.

It’s all true, but the problem is that almost nobody pays any attention.

If non-profits want to make real impact, they need to ditch the scary statistics and tell the story of one child, one woman, one family.

As Wintsh notes, moms “can make the connection between an emotional message and a brand, without you beating them over the head.”

“In research they tell us, ‘I want to feel something.’”

What's true for millennial moms is true for the rest of us. Enough facts and figures. Just tell me a story.

What Do the Media Want?

 

One of the questions I hear most often from people who do communications for non-profit groups is: What does the media want?

The question usually arises after someone has shared about how they sent a press release to the media, but got no response. 

Why didn’t the media call back? What did I do wrong? What are they looking for?

When it comes to answering those questions, who better to ask than the media themselves?

Over my years doing media relations, I’ve have asked some reporters exactly those questions, and others. Here’s what they told me.

(For the record, the people who I asked are a TV news director, a TV news anchor, a radio show host, radio reporter and two print reporters.)

1. They want you to know they are very, very busy.

The media is very short-staffed today. Fewer and fewer reporters and producers have to produce more and more content. They can hardly keep up.

“I get 300 e-mails a day, all competing for my attention.”  

“We are short-staffed, and resources are in short supply. It’s insane in the newsroom, there’s little time to think, everything is on the fly.”

“I can get hundreds of press releases a day in my e-mail, and when I'm scanning through them, they can all start to look the same.”

2. They want you to send them shorter and clearer press releases.

With so little time, reporters don’t have time to read lengthy press releases. At best, they will give each e-mail 30 seconds. If you haven’t grabbed their attention by then, too bad.

“Don’t send us a long press release—we won’t read it. Make it fast and clear and idiot-proof. Tell me why I should care. Capture my attention.”

“Make sure press releases contain all the essential facts—put them right up there, right at top, right in our face. Don’t make us sift through lots of information to get to the who, what, where and when. It’s not our job to decipher what you are trying to say—that’s your job.”

“Your press release should surprise me, tell me something I haven’t heard before, something that matters to people where they live, that’s relevant. And make it short.”

3. They want the press release to contain news that matters to their audience.

The first question a reporter asks when getting a press release is: “Who cares?” If your press release doesn’t show why your story matters to their readers, listeners or viewers, they won’t follow-up.

“Tell us why your story is important to our readers, why they will care.”

“When we get a press release, we ask: ‘Is this new? Is it surprising? Is it something the larger community needs to hear about?’”

4. They want to talk to real people.

They don’t want just facts and figures. They want people, especially someone who is affected by the story, someone who feels it in a personal way.

“Give us people to interview, not just facts and figures. We need someone to make it real for the viewer. Don’t send someone to talk about MS—send us someone with MS who is affected by the story.”

“We want to tell stories through people involved in the story, people who are living the story. Give us someone with experience in the story, to make it live.”

5. If you want to get on TV, they need action.

TV is visual. So if you want to get on TV, you need to think visually. Meetings are not visual, so don’t give TV reporters a BOPSA: Bunch Of People Sitting Around.

“Think visually. If you are inviting us to an event, hold it in a place that reinforces the message. If it’s about saving the environment, show us some trees.”

“TV needs pictures. Think about how to make an event visual. Tell us what we can see.”

“We can’t show research. People tune out strings of numbers.”

6. They want non-profit communicators to understand their world.

If you are going to do well at your job, you need to—at a minimum—read, listen to and watch your local media. (You’d be surprised at how many communicators don’t do that.) This will help you understand what the various media outlets like to report about, and how they like to do it.

You also need to find out who reports about what at each outlet—what beats they cover, and who covers them. And you need to understand their deadlines.

“The media relations people we like the best are people who want to know how they can help us, who understand our deadlines and needs.”

“Pay attention to the media you want to deal with. Know what we cover, and how we cover it—and what we have covered in the past.”

“Have a good understanding of what the niche is of the reporter or media outlet you are trying to reach, or how they frame stories. I don't know how many amazing story ideas were given to me that I simply couldn't use because it didn't fit our mandate.”

In future posts, I’ll write more about how to catch the attention of the media, and how to work with reporters. But for now, there you have it—straight from the media’s mouth.