Avoid Jargon and Write Clearly: a Recipe for Changing the World

“There’s a great power in words,” said the 19th-century humorist Josh Billings, “if you don’t hitch too many of them together.”

If Mr. Billings were around today, he would love the Flesch score.

The Flesch score — also known as the Flesch Reading Ease scale — is found on most Microsoft toolbars. It tells you how readable something is. It works on a scale of 0-100. The more readable a piece of text, the higher the score. If used right, it might just change the way the nonprofit world works. The most readable things in the world are in the high 60s, the 70s, and above. (The first chapters of the Book of Genesis, King James version, for example, have a Flesch score of 93.3.)

The most dismally thick writing scores in the 20s and below.

Most writing in the known universe falls somewhere in between.

Rudolf Flesch, author of Why Johnnie Can’t Read — and What You Can Do About It, invented the tool in the 1940s to promote clear writing. His test measures sentence length (shorter is better), and word length (ditto). What it adds up to, in the end, is whether average folks can understand what you’re saying.

Foundation and nonprofit leaders tend to go into their jobs because they want to help those average folks. They just don’t show it in their language. They tend to hitch too many words together. And those tend to be long. And vague. And full of jargon.

Why do nonprofit writers write that way? In part because they want room to maneuver or make whatever case they have to make. If you can’t understand what they are saying, you can’t pin them down or say they are wrong.

Some do it because they think $5 words instead of 50-cent words make them look smarter. But most just do it because that’s what everyone else does.

Which leads us back to the Flesch score.

Because bad writing tends to be long on syllables, just getting rid of words with three or more can easily raise your score.

But here comes the tricky part: Flesch does not have a brain. It can’t think. It cannot tell the right word from the wrong word. It does not sift the poetry from the muck.

For example:

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” — Thomas Paine (Flesch score: 100)

“The girl, water man, in a horse set grass.” (Also 100)

So, if someone were to use short jargon (i.e., metric, rubric, cohort, mode, scale, etc.), they would ipso facto get a higher Flesch score than if they went with tumbling sheets of polysyllabic bubble wrap, i.e., strategic evaluation, implementation of essential infrastructure, educational trajectories. (The words in italics score 0).

In other words, don’t just delete multiple syllables. Find the right words to put in their place.

One morning, I pointed to a map of the United States, took the spot my finger landed on, then found the largest foundation within 250 miles. I clicked on the group’s news releases.

Now, in foundations, as in most organizations, news releases are where the work the group does gets mulched into common language so that the rest of the world can learn all about how those great and good things shake down in real life.

At the place I chose — let’s call it Foundation X — I did a Flesch scoring on the first two paragraphs, 115 words long, of a recent news release.

Flesch: 4.3.

Which pretty much means this: What they wrote would be just as unintelligible to a nuclear physicist as it would be to a banana slug. On a scale of 0-100, it is, pure and simple, unreadable.

But here’s the other thing: In those first 115 words of the news release — and 115 words can sum up any story — this appears:

Initiative, enable increased numbers, participate, financial stability, economic mobility, fostering positive outcomes, national nonprofit organization, partners with community organizations, economic opportunities, Web-based technology, case-management services, income-enhancing public, private benefits.

That’s 29 words. Twenty-nine words with a Flesch score of 0.

But some people in the nonprofit world are starting to fight the use of bad or hard-to-read language.

I started a new consulting job at a major foundation not long ago and was delighted to find a bright young staff hellbent on raising their Flesch scores.

I almost fell over, and it made me think:

What if every writer at every nonprofit group used Flesch with the same force of habit with which they brush their teeth?

What if nonprofit CEO’s ruled that any piece of writing within their walls had to have, at the very least, a Flesch 35? And that every bit going out to the public had to have a Flesch 45? Or even a Flesch 50?

People all over this land would be able to see what nonprofit groups do. Their trustees could see if it was all working right. And if it wasn’t, someone could see, plain as day, how to fix it.

Further, both the folks who give money and those who receive it could see, perhaps for the first time, just how good philanthropy really is.

What a wonderful — and readable — world it would be.

How do we do it? One writer at a time.

Starting here.

Flesch score of essay above: 73.9.

Mary Ann Hogan is a story coach based in south Florida who consults nationally with journalists, foundations, museums, and other organizations.