| How do I ensure my message has an impact? | Make sure your message is readable. |
When you feel the tug of a cause, it’s electric. The first time you recognize an issue, it’s like a light has flipped on; the world is lit up in a new way. Then you want the whole world to know what you know and see what you see.
When there’s a problem, like climate change, you want people to be aware. If you have an idea for a solution, like a policy or a technology or a program, you want people to support it. And when you see a gap, like a community that has lost its after-school programs, you want donors to fill it. It’s natural to get excited.
Your haste to pursue an ideal or the struggle to keep the work going can prevent you from connecting with the very people you need to reach.
All your insight, knowledge, research, expertise, and lived experience may have inspired you… but there’s still more work to do. Idealism alone won’t win hearts and minds.
If your ideas aren’t attracting the kind of attention you’d hoped, it’s time to examine your approach. There are a lot of reasons why your message might not be grabbing people’s attention, but one of the most common barriers is readability. Luckily, this is easily fixed.
Readable text is easy to understand. “Readability” refers to the words you use, the order you place them in, and how you arrange your thoughts from the beginning to the end.
If you are trying to engage people, your writing needs to be readable. This typically means writing for people at a grade 6-10 reading level – the level at which most adults can understand your text.
Half of Canadian adults (48%) have literacy skills below a high school level. They struggle to understand longer texts, complicated language, and to recognize paraphrased information. They have difficulty identifying a fact or a message that is mixed in with other text and they find it hard to ignore irrelevant information.
About one in six adults struggles to understand information that is essential for their health and civic life — such as filling in a form, or reading voter and prescription instructions.
Most standards use grades as a reference point, but you can’t tell someone’s literacy by schooling alone. People who finish school but don’t read regularly will lose their literacy skills. Highly-educated people learning a new language will start with low literacy. People who leave school may have developed very strong reading and math skills. Likewise, people who read a lot at work may better understand and remember simple, readable texts. Even highly-literate audiences may be tired of reading all day at work and unwilling to consume complex messages in their leisure time.
The best choice is always to keep your writing simple. If you want to be read, be readable.
Readable words tend to be words people hear every day. Shorter is better. Direct is better. Unless you are trying to teach people new vocabulary, don’t use words that will send them running to a dictionary.
Using different words to say the same thing may be poetic, but it’s not great for comprehension. Half of adults struggle to understand information that has been paraphrased — meaning they can’t recognize the same information rewritten in different words. Stick to familiar, repetitive vocabulary as much as you can.
Keep your sentences under 25 words (but aim for 15). Long sentences are hard to follow, even if all of the words are short. Readers will understand 90% of what they read in a 14-word sentence, but less than 10% of a 43-word sentence. If you write long sentences, you might as well write in a different language.
Put the actor at the beginning of a sentence. “You wrote a compelling speech” is easier to understand than “A compelling speech was written by you” or “A compelling speech was written.” Or, you could focus on the speech instead on the speaker, and say “This speech is compelling.”
Some fields, like law and science, intentionally use passive language in order to be neutral. But for general communications, advocacy, and public speaking, direct is better.
Numbers are even more difficult for people than words. More than half of adults in Canada have difficulty understanding percentages, recognizing patterns, and interpreting graphs or tables. Nearly one in four have difficulty counting and sorting. Don’t alienate readers by making them to math to understand your point.
Having something important to say is only the first step in the process. Once your ideas are on paper, it’s time to edit.
When you edit, you organize your thoughts so readers can understand them easily. You cut out information that is distracting or unnecessary. You change the words you used in the first draft, replacing long words with short ones and uncommon words with familiar ones. This is how readability happens.
Editing often takes longer than the original editing process, but it’s worth it. Spending a bit of time on editing makes your communications accessible and readable; what you lose in speed you make up in impact. You don’t have to become a grammar expert. There are lots of free and inexpensive tools that help you edit, including Readable for articles and Yoast for web pages.
Once people understand your message, remember it, and act on it, your work will make a real difference.
Connecting with the public is absolutely essential for social impact. This isn’t a grammar-nerd thing. This is an equity and inclusion thing. It’s a do-a-good-job thing.
If you care about social impact, you care about connecting with people. And if you care about people, you need to care about readability.
Words inspire actions that transform our communities. Your words. Make them count for everyone.
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