Use Simple Language
It matters more than you think.
This is a transcript of a Toastmasters speech I gave.1 It relates to the subject of this blog. And so I’m including it here. See Index and FAQ for more about the rest of the blog.
As George Bernard Shaw said,
The main problem with communication is the illusion that it happened.
Today I will talk about that illusion. About how complex language makes it happen.
Imagine. I’m trying to explain something to you. I say it in a complex way. You do not understand. You’re too embarrassed to tell me. Now I have the illusion that I communicated.
This happened to me a lot.
I was trained as a mathematician. Mathematicians use very complex language. So did I.2 We all considered it normal.
I remember teaching Calculus. I tried, but my students couldn’t learn. I was told, “That’s not your fault. They never learn. They’re just bad at math.”
I believed this. I was also told how clear I was. How well I laid things out. I was praised as a good communicator. Smart people told me this, and I did not doubt it.
But not everyone could understand me.
Here is what we missed. Nobody can hear how complex language is. Not until you can’t understand it. So if you could understand me, you didn’t hear what I was doing wrong.
I owe my Calculus students an apology.3 But this is not just me. And it’s not new.
It takes work to handle long words, unfamiliar words, long sentences, and complex grammar. Our brains shut down when it’s too much.
Researchers combined these in different ways. They created measurements of complexity of language. These measurements have named like Flesh-Kincaid and Gunning-Fog. The researchers named them after themselves.
They then measured the complexity of standard textbooks. Grade 4 is simpler than grade 5. Grade 5 is simpler than grade 6. And so on. This let them say, “We hand out writing as complex as this in grade 11.”
They took this into the real world.4 Their first success was in newspapers. At the time newspaper articles averaged a 4th year university complexity. Working with editors, researchers got this down to grade 11. More people could now read the newspaper. So more people subscribed.
Some took this farther. TV Guide and Reader’s Digest both aim for grade 9 readability. Popular fiction averages grade 7. This helped them become popular. Because it is hard to be popular when you’re not understood.
The American Medical Association targets grade 8 on public communication. At that point, half of American adults still can’t read it. But we hope that a friend can explain.
I wanted this talk to be understood. I got it down to grade 5. That’s probably too much. But I wanted to show success.
Now I have to remind you of failure.
I’ll pick on lawyers. Lawyers write contracts. How many here have signed a contract you couldn’t read? That’s because lawyers think5 that postgraduate writing is clear.
Next I’ll pick on the IRS. I read an internal IRS style guide.6 It had examples of good writing. Clear writing meant for the public. Its complexity was grade 12. The smart executive who wrote it could not see the problem. Nor could her coworkers who reviewed it. But that is not understandable. Every April 15 the public sees the result. Do you think that goes well?
Here is my last example. I speak English natively. Imagine me talking to an immigrant. I pick the perfect word, like “perplexed”. My complex grammar makes my language sing.
But my purpose here is not poetry. It is to be understood. I am not understood.
If I notice that, what will I do? Here is what most of us do.7 We say the same thing. Using the same words. But this time, s-l-o-w-l-y and l-o-u-d-l-y. Guess what! That never works!
Multinational companies say that their best communicators speak English as a second language. Here is why. They use words that everybody knows. They use language that everybody can understand. So everybody understands them.
I wanted to do better once I knew my problem. Here is what I did.
I found an online readability checker. You can get the researcher’s formulas on a free webpage. I took things I had written. Emails, project notes, and so on. I pasted them in. They were complex. Then I practiced trying to say the same thing, directly and simply. And pasted that in.
It was hard.8 Sometimes it felt like pulling teeth.9 But I learned how to do it.10
I had thought that simple meant longer. I was wrong. I can now say the same thing in fewer words. I catch my own errors more easily. And more people can understand me.
I first had to learn that this was important. Only then I could improve.
Hopefully you are now convinced that this matters. Please try my exercise. I hope that it helps you. Just like it helped me.
Not an exact transcript. This is actually a transcript of my attempt to give the same talk again.
My language was usually about grade 11. Then got worse on technical topics. Paul Graham;s essay Write Like You Talk is good advice. But it won’t help if your speech is also too complex. Which mine was.
I do not know that I could teach Calculus to the students who did not understand me. But my complex language didn’t help.
These examples came from the Wikipedia entry on Readability.
Not all lawyers. For example see The Case for Plain-Language Contracts.
Unfortunately I can’t find the link, or I would give it.
That said, they have improved. Not because they figured it out. But because Congress ordered them to. You can read more about that at The Plain Writing Compliance Report. But even their good writing has problems. They give Let us help you as a good example. It ends with,
If you’re having tax problems because of financial difficulties or immediate threat of adverse action that you haven’t been able to resolve them with the IRS, the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) may be able to help you.
That’s a college level run-on sentence. With a grammatical error. Can you find it? Which word should be removed?
I never made the mistake of repeating myself. I always rephrased. But that didn’t help much. All of my phrasings were too complex.
As the lawyer in footnote 5 said, “Unlearning how to write like a lawyer was harder than we expected.” There is a lot of repeated failure. You know what you’re doing wrong. But you still do it wrong. And your wrong looks right to you. This becomes incredibly frustrating.
We use complex language for many reasons. One is to hide from what we’re saying. For example non-apologies are usually complex. For another example, look back to footnote 6. The IRS did well on simple language for most of Let us help you. Then they had to say, “If the IRS fails you, try calling our critics at the Taxpayer Advocate Service.” Is it a surprise that they hid behind complex language?
So when I simplified my language, I saw what I was hiding from myself. I was shocked by this. Facing that is what felt like pulling teeth.
I could not have given this talk two years ago. I wouldn’t have known how.
I can’t always use language as simple as this speech. For example I can’t rewrite the average consumer contract at a grade 5 level. But I can usually get it down to grade 8. Without changing what it means.