Marketing: Writing Tools

WRITE AT A READING LEVEL TO MAXIMIZE YOUR READERSHIP

Is your writing reaching your readers? Or are you writing above their heads and turning them away? Whether you are creating surveys, website articles, blogs, or any other materials, it’s important for your audience to be drawn to your writing. One way is to test the reading level of your writing.

We’ve been taught over the years that newspapers should write to a 6th or 8th grade reading level. Some studies have shown, and it’s logical to expect that readership is directly correlated to writing to readers’ reading levels.

Want to test your writing? Read on.

INSURE YOU ARE COMMUNICATING CORRECTLY WITH YOUR READERS

Through my good friend, Anne Davis, we received a request for a tool to test the reading level of a self-care guide for cancer patients being designed by a team of Ph.D. candidates in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Nursing.

Internally, we also wanted a test for our own writing. And we wanted to understand the criteria within any test we used. So we did some research, and found a number of tools designed over the years to calculate readability:

• Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Score, Coleman Liau Index, SMOG Index, Automated Reability Index, Dale-Chall formula

Then we discovered a great tool powered by the open source project, PHP Text Statistics, http://code.google.com/p/php-text-statistics/, which has created a PHP class for giving information about text, including readability scores. This updated class was released under a BSD License in August 2008.

With thanks to the folks at PHP Text Statistics, we’ve incorporated this class for your use.

P.S. For what it’s worth, we tested one of our research tools pages, thinking we were writing for about 12th grade level, and found it was at 17.5.

TEST YOUR WRITING NOW

RELATED RESOURCES

Do you want to explore more about reading levels? Here are three articles we found very interesting. Each of them tests reading levels of various publications and specific articles.

• William DuBay at Impact Information, http://www.impact-information.com, wrote an excellent detailed analysis of readability at various newspapers, Victims of Fog Creep: What’s With the Newspapers? http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/newsletter/plwork15.htm.

He tested readability of various publications from The Times of India (grade 15) to The Daily Mirror (grade 9), and provides tables over time for various publications.

“Two magazines with the largest circulations in the world, TV Guide and Readers Digest, are written at the 9th-grade reading level. The newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, the Sun, is written at the 9th-grade reading level. USA Today is written at the 10th-grade level.”

• Bill Sloat of the The Bellwether Daily, http://thebellwetherdaily.blogspot.com/, wrote a very good article, Cleveland Plain Dealer Internal Memo: Connie Schultz Writes At 5th Grade Level, http://thebellwetherdaily.blogspot.com/2007/10/cleveland-plain-dealer-internal-memo.html.

In the article, he discusses the insightful book, A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work by Jack R. Hart

• Tim Porter writes Second Draft, http://www.timporter.com/seconddraft/. In his earlier blog, First Draft, he wrote an excellent article, Reading the Vanishing Newspaper, 6: Readability, http://timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000418.html.

Part of his discussion is about the great book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism In The Information Age by Philip Meyer.

“In the last chapter of the ‘Vanishing Newspaper,’ I learned that reporters too dumb for sources. In Chapter 6 of Philip Meyer’s new book, I find out that newspapers are too smart for their readers. Talk about a conundrum of the damned.”

I enjoyed his use of the Flesch-Kincaid index to test readability of the most popular blogs (based on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem), which showed Instapundit at a grade level, 10.0, and Daily Kos with a grade level, 12.0.

COMING FOR YOUR NEXT SURVEY

Are you tired yet of calculating sampling errors manually? We gave up in 1981 and wrote a simple calculator to determine the random sample size needed for our surveys at a given statistical validity (or the reverse). We’ve integrated it into our real-time customer and patient satisfaction systems. Now we’ve decided you deserve to use it as well. So it’s coming soon, just for you.

WHAT OTHER TOOLS DO YOU WANT?

Let us know what we can provide that could make your research and marketing communications easier.

Tags: marketing tools, reading level, research tools, writing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Marketing, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.