Category Archives: Writing

Writing Readably Doesn’t Mean You’re Stupid

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Yesterday, I celebrated long writing. Today, I’m going to demonize it.

Fog Index Algorithm

The Fog Index Algorithm

My point yesterday was that long-form writing, such as a book, often engages readers effectively. But when it comes to words and sentences, length can be a reader’s enemy.

I hadn’t planned on this follow-up today. What spurred me on was a column by Meghan Daum in this morning’s Los Angeles Times. Headlined “Speaking down to Americans,” it discusses a recent study by the Sunlight Foundation analyzing the grade level of speeches by members of Congress. The analytical tool used by the study is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which, as Daum puts it, associates long words and sentences with higher grade levels.

The misleading implication of those grade levels is that the higher your writing scores, the smarter you are. As a result, much of the press coverage of this study has interpreted it to mean that by using shorter words and sentences, politicians are either becoming dumber or speaking down to Americans.

And that, I first thought, was the gist of Daum’s column, which a possibly overworked copy editor had subtitled as follows:

“Researchers have found that politicians’ rhetorical skills have taken a dive since 2005, when they were at an 11th-grade level.”

It turns out, though, that Daum doesn’t really think that. In fact, she argues that the foundation’s data are meaningless: such studies, she says, “measure not meaning or depth of thought but characters and syllables and average number of words per sentence.” And she criticizes both those who fault legislators for speaking plainly and the foundation for doing the analysis:

“It seems disingenuous to mourn the passing of a time when you needed a 17th-grade education to understand what your president was saying. Not as disingenuous, however, as using a hopelessly reductive study to assail one’s political enemies in the most predictable way.”

So Daum seems to be in favor of readability, but blithely tosses aside the Flesch-Kincaid test as useless. Similarly, The Atlantic’s Eric Randall, while in favor of short words and sentences, suggests that the test promotes verbosity: “Flesch-Kincaid rewards long words and winding sentences, but clarity rewards the opposite.”

Well, no. Flesch-Kincaid doesn’t reward long words. It penalizes them. The entire point of using the test is not to raise the grade level of your writing, but to lower it.

The confusion is the inevitable result of the decision to tie writing skills to reading comprehension grade levels. I’m not quite sure whom to blame for this fatal mistake. It doesn’t seem to have been readability maven Rudolf Flesch, whose original readability index used a 100-point scale (the higher the score, the more readable the prose). The error may have been introduced by Robert Gunning, inventor (in 1952) of the Fog Index. The Flesch-Kincaid test, developed in 1975, followed Gunning in using grade levels to assess writing.

Whatever the source of the grade-level equivalence, it’s a problem. When I used to lead in-house seminars on readability for editors of technical magazines, descriptions of the grading system always backfired at first.

Our readers have PhD’s, they’d think. We’re smart too. We can write at grade 20! Bring on the 50-word sentences and sesquipedalian locutions!

The real goal, of course, is just the opposite. If you can write at grade-level 5, you should—not because you want to reach fifth-graders, but because even your doctoral readers will likely find such prose lucid, appealing, and memorable.

The same caveat applies today as yesterday, however: It all depends. Talented writers can reel off long, polysyllabic sentences to brilliant effect; inept writers can produce wretched short ones.

The smartest writers combine both approaches. It isn’t the length of any one sentence that matters—it’s the average over the course of several paragraphs or pages. Long words and sentences are not proscribed by Flesch-Kincaid. They just need  balancing with short ones.

The Flesch-Kincaid test or the Fog Index, used circumspectly, can help improve your writing. But remember this crucial point: you’re testing for readability—not for your intelligence.

Is Longer Better? Books, Twitter, and Engagement

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One of the truisms of new media is that if you want your content to have an impact, you should keep it short. It’s a handy rule of thumb, but not an iron-clad rule. Tl;dr doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, in fact, longer is better.

Best Sellers by Tier, Mark Coker, Huffington PostFor a case in point, see Smashwords founder Mark Coker’s recent Huffington post article, “Do E-Book Customers Prefer Longer or Shorter Books?” In it, he offers data showing that bestsellers on Smashwords run long, and that “readers go out of their way to search out and purchase longer e-books.”

I doubt that readers actually seek out length per se—figuring that out for an e-book takes some effort. The key, rather, is that longer works tend more often than shorter ones to produce the kind of engagement that prompts readers to recommend them to others.

What long books are good at is creating a flow of thought or, if you prefer, a world, that absorbs the reader into it. Length is not an impediment to this end, but (almost) a requirement.

One of the defining characteristics of Twitter is its severe restriction on length, with a maximum of 140 characters per tweet. Though you might think its brevity is the key to its success, I don’t think that’s quite true.

A single tweet generally won’t draw you in. It only does so to the extent that it is part of a flow of thought, whether that’s a collective Twitter stream or an individual’s ongoing tweets. The brevity of a tweet makes it accessible, but frequency of tweets is what builds engagement.

I’d stop short of suggesting that length is necessary to engagement, though. It’s possible to build engagement through a short form, but it’s much harder. Both time and artistry are required. As Pascal told a correspondent, “I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.”

The lesson to draw from this, I think, is not that longer is better. The important thing is focus on engagement. Don’t ask whether your content is too long or too short. Ask instead whether it’s connecting with the reader.

Writing for the Web: The Human Algorithm and Zero-Sum SEO

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Rockhopper Penguin Photo © Samuel Blanc [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Do you write for the Penguin, or the human?

I sometimes fear that search-engine optimization (SEO)  is the only aspect of new media that people have really cottoned to. Not that they’ve understood it, necessarily, but that they feel it is both justified and essential. It is something they simply accept.

But for any content creator, SEO (as most people practice it, at least) is the kiss of death. If you want your content to work, write for people, not for search engines.

I was reminded of this at last week’s SIPA meeting. In the course of a wandering and inconclusive presentation on writing for the Web, one of my fellow audience members asked the room, “Does anyone here think SEO isn’t important?” Out of perhaps 20 editors and writers in attendance, I was the only one who raised a hand.

This struck me as both worrisome and curious. No one there was particularly enthusiastic about SEO or how it aided their craft, but all glumly accepted its necessity.

In my defense, I argued that SEO is a losing game. The moment you achieve that precious optimization, Google changes its algorithm and reverses all your gains.

I might have added, it’s also frequently a zero-sum game. That is, whatever you gain from writing for search engines, your site visitors lose through irrelevant or shallow content.

My cynicism about SEO doesn’t mean I’m not in favor of marketing your content. Most writers, I think, need to do more marketing to potential readers, not less. But both parties should gain from that marketing effort. You should want your visitors to find your content because it’s exactly what they need, not because you successfully gamed a search engine.

Another way to put this is that, as a writer or journalist, you should worry less about Google’s algorithm and more about the human algorithm.

That to me is the takeaway from Guillaume Bouchard’s recent Search Engine Watch article on Google’s Penguin update.

Bouchard argues that the “solution for not getting pummeled every time Google changes its algorithm is to focus on providing the best possible relevancy to users.” You should focus on users, not SEO, in creating your content, he says, because “people, not just machines, have to get something out of it.” The best strategy for bringing your content to the attention of your target readers, he suggests, is to make it clean, clear, and useful.

That’s good SEO advice. Just as important, it’s good writing advice, too. Take it, and both you and your readers will avoid the zero-sum game.

 

The Tyranny of Images: Why Instagram and Pinterest Worry Me

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This photo has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this blog post. Which in this case, oddly, is precisely the point.

Today’s news that the mobile photo-sharing platform Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion underscores a trend that’s been gnawing at me for the last few months. Mark Zuckerberg clearly understands that images are an increasingly important element in social discourse. So do the founders of the visually oriented Pinterest, which in less than a year has leapt from obscurity to become the third most popular social network on the web.

Why should this worry me? I’m a reasonably visual guy. I’ve been a serious photographer since my childhood, and my years as a magazine editor taught me the importance of balancing words with images.

I guess I fear that the emphasis now being given to the visual is upsetting that balance.  Increasingly, words alone are seen as inadequate or insufficiently appealing. As Joel Friedlander says, explaining why he plunks a large photo into the top of every post on his blog, “it’s a given: blog articles attract more interest with photographs and other images.” Pinterest only intensifies this need for images. In fact, as Tony Hallet pointed out last month, if a blog post has no images, it essentially doesn’t exist in Pinterest’s eyes.

Knowing this, any blogger that wants to be read will find an image to go with the words. That’s great when an image enhances or reinforces the meaning of the words. But all too often it doesn’t. Finding a picture that explains an abstract concept is difficult, especially if you limit yourself to images you have a clear-cut right to use. As a result, bloggers frequently face this choice: go without an image, or settle for one that looks good but has little to do with your topic.  Increasingly, they will have no reasonable option but the latter. It’s the tyranny of the image.

I agree, as Tony Hallet says, that “it’s arguably the photographer, the illustrator, the graphic designer, maybe even the infographic creator who will hold the key to much of what lies ahead.” It’s another question, though, whether the key opens the right door.

30 Lessons from 30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

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Twenty-nine days ago, I set out to write a post a day for this blog. Somehow, despite a couple of late nights, I managed to achieve my goal. Though no one’s going to hand me a blogger’s version of their badge, I feel something akin to the mixture of pride and relief all those successful NaNoWriMo writers must be experiencing today.

Sophie

My less-than-helpful blogging companion

In writing 30 posts, I more than doubled my previous most productive month, way back in October 2009, and far exceeded my usual average. Though I didn’t manage to limit myself to a half-hour of writing time per post, I’m certain I was more efficient than in the past, when I could linger over a single paragraph for several hours.

Moreover, I discovered that my writing was none the worse for the time limits and daily quota I imposed on myself. What I feared might turn out to be a month of sub-par blog posts ended up at least as good as my average work, and possibly better.

But aside from hitting an arbitrary target, have I really achieved anything?  Can I, or you, for that matter, learn anything from the experience?

I think so. In fact, if I set my mind to it, I can come up with 30 things I’ve learned from my month of daily blogging. It makes, admittedly, for a rather longish, slightly punch-drunk, tl;dr kind of list. But if I’ve gained nothing else from the experience, dear reader, I now have a new appreciation for the value of perseverance. Make it through the following list and you might feel it too.

  1. More content means more blog traffic. Yes, I know it’s obvious. But seeing is believing. November, not yet concluded, has already witnessed more visitors and page views than any previous month. I may have almost as many regular readers now as Rex Hammock.
  2. However, content without marketing is like a cart without a horse. No matter how good it is, content can’t go anywhere by itself. It needs to be marketed. When I tweeted about my content, it clearly got more page views than when I didn’t.
  3. There’s nothing like help from people in high places. By far the most visitors I got on any day this month was when The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal retweeted one of my posts.
  4. Writing every day makes you a better writer. To quote Jeff Goins quoting Frank Viola quoting T.S. Eliot, “Writing everyday is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.” Whatever you may think of my writing here today, I can assure you that it’s improved from a month ago.
  5. Writing short is hard. If you’re Seth Godin, you can blow a reader’s mind with a three-sentence post. However, all but one of us aren’t Seth Godin, and it usually takes many more sentences to make our points convincingly. Aim for brevity; be satisfied with clarity.
  6. Scheduling a time to write is a good idea that rarely works in practice. I tried to follow Paul Conley’s advice, but reality kept intervening.
  7. Set strict rules for your writing. I couldn’t have written a post a day without the rules I set at the beginning. Arbitrary restrictions and goals spur creativity. That’s why good sonnets are easier to write than good free verse.
  8. Break your rules as often as necessary. To be honest, my rules were more honored in the breach than the observance. If I had followed them religiously, I would not have met my goal.
  9. Good comments beget good posts. The best comment I had this month essentially accused me—in a nice way—of idiocy. It led me to reconsider my ideas in another post that, if it didn’t rectify my errors, put nice polish on them.
  10. Write about other bloggers. Not only does it give you something to talk about, but it’s what the social web is all about. Share the links!
  11. Do Q & A interviews. Even better than writing about other bloggers is asking them to speak in their own words, as I did with Mark Schaefer.
  12. Encourage contributors. It would have broken my rules, but if you want to fill your blog with good content every day, well-chosen guest bloggers can be a big help.
  13. Get used to repeating yourself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Most of us are driven by a few idées fixes. Repetition is a way of developing those ideas.
  14. Now and then, try something completely different. Such as saying the opposite of what you just suggested.
  15. Accept your imperfections. Perfection is something you work towards. Though you may never get there, the only way you can get closer is through your mistakes.
  16. Make bold statements. Your readers, too, will accept your imperfections. It’s all right if you don’t completely understand or believe what you’re saying. It’s a blog. You’re testing out an idea, not writing legislation.
  17. Don’t wait until after supper to start writing a post. Especially if you had a bit too much wine.
  18. On the other hand, consider writing your post the night before. No morning is so glorious to wake up to as the one when you’ve already written your post for the day.
  19. Keep your pets well fed. One of my cats prefers to eat small amounts of expensive canned food every half-hour or so. I can’t leave her food out, though, because my other cat will eat any amount of any food at any time. So my picky cat likes to remind me to feed her by standing on her hind legs and tapping me gently on the arm with her paw. Inevitably, she does so just as I am about to break through my hours-long writer’s block.
  20. Use an editorial calendar, but don’t make it a fetish. It can help to know days in advance what you’ll write about, but sometimes when you start on it, you realize it’s a terrible, boring subject. Always be prepared to change your topic at the last moment.
  21. Go on a Twitter diet. I don’t mean stay away from Twitter altogether. It can be a great source of inspiration. But it can also be an enormous time-suck. Limit your Twitter time strictly when you’re on deadline.
  22. Get personal. That’s the point of blogging, isn’t it? But if you’re the self-effacing type—shucks, no one cares about me—you have to keep reminding yourself of this obvious truism.
  23. Repurpose content with great care. If you think it’s easier than writing original blog content, you’re doing something wrong. Your blog is a different context and audience than whatever you originally wrote for. If you don’t adapt your content accordingly, it will fall flat.
  24. Don’t let the mechanics of blogging waylay you. Need to finish your post? Then this is not the time to worry about SEO, to rethink your site taxonomy, or to install that plug-in you’ve been researching for the past month.
  25. Artwork is nice but not essential. Yes, adding an eye-catching drawing or photograph probably does increase the page views your post gets. But don’t make yourself crazy trying to come up with something. Ultimately, the writing must stand on its own.  And if you can’t think of anything else, you can always use a photo of your cat.
  26. Split your posts up. If you tend to write long, consider whether you might better serve time-challenged readers by spreading it out in smaller chunks over two or three days.
  27. At a loss for words? Take a walk. If it worked for Dickens, why not you?
  28. When all else fails, quote somebody inspiring. Thank you, Mr. Perelman.
  29. Always Be Composing. If you’re serious about your writing, you should be thinking about it all the time. In everything you do throughout the day, you should be wondering, “Say, could I write about this?”
  30. If you’re going to write a numbers post, stick to single digits. Five lessons would have been so much easier.

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