Words Have Meaning

You hear and read a lot of words over the course of a 30 year career. In a perfect world, most of them would be used in the manner for which they were created. An effective writer/speaker would chose their words wisely, and an effective reader/listener would possess a precise understanding of their meaning. This is not a perfect world...

It continues to amaze me how difficult it is for some people to string together a few words into a coherent sentence, or a few sentences into a coherent paragraph. In my humble opinion, much of the problem stems from people trying to present themselves in a manner more complex and sophisticated than reality allows. They overuse, oversize, and over-think their word choices.

Early in my career I was introduced to the Gunning Fog Index. This index was created by Robert Gunning in 1952 for the purpose of measuring the "readablility" of english writing. The index is calculated as follows:

The result of this index when applied to a written document, indicates the approximate educational grade level that could reasonably be expected to fully understand the message in the document. For example, a result of 8 would mean that an eigth-grader should be able to fully comprehend what he or she was reading. Likewise, a result of 12 indicates a high school senior should have a firm grasp on the meaning.

Did I mention that this index was created in 1952? In today's text messaging world of one-letter words and phonetically engineered alpha-numeric sentences, if your writing is more complex than the eigth-grade level, you are going to lose a high percentage of your audience. To be fair, the speed of business is much faster than it was 58 years ago. People simply don't have the time to read or write anything more complex than a Powerpoint presentation with six bullet points. Keep your words simple and your sentences short... Tell the story but don't let the story get in the way of the message...

When it comes to the spoken word, there is one curious thing I have noticed while spending way too much time with executive leadership: The sophistication of business language is inversely related to the executive level of the person speaking. Generally, the bigger the office, the smaller the words. The average word length in the "C" Suite is four letters. This is especially true of female executives. And especially when it comes to the "F" word. These words should be used sparingly - like exclamation points...

Words have meaning... choose them wisely.