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The average third grader should be able to read the headline to this column. The words are short. Most are one syllable. The sentence is free of jargon and the language is easy to understand. In fact, if you run the headline through Flesch-Kincaid, a tool to measure the readability level of textbooks for grade schools, it returns a ‘grade level’ of 3.8. For comparison, the text to the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) returns a grade level score of 13.
Many smart leaders speak in third grade language to reach the most people.
“That’s absurd!” I can hear you say.
Is it?
Let’s turn to Steve Jobs, one of the most gifted communicators on the business stage. In 1997 Jobs and his ad agency created the iconic commercial, “The Crazy Ones.” Steve Jobs co-wrote the text. Actor Richard Dreyfuss read the ad. Here’s the text to the commercial.While the meaning of some of the words might be lost on the average grade school student, according to Flesch-Kincaid the average second or third grader should be able to read it.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I wasn’t so sure that a second grade student could read the ad. Fortunately I had access to my own experiment. My youngest daughter was half-way through the second grade. Here is the recording of Lela reading “The Crazy Ones.” She stumbles on just two words: quo and genius.
The “Crazy Ones” is a television commercial. Can smart leaders use such simple language to launch products? They can and they do. Let’s turn to one of the most brilliant visionaries of our time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk reads obscure Soviet-era rocket manuals for fun, yet he speaks to the general public in language the average grade-school student can read and, in many cases, understand.
When Musk introduced the Tesla Powerwall in April of 2015, he explained that the product is a home battery that captures sunlight from solar panels and converts it to energy. Although it’s designed for the average consumer the technology behind the Powerwall is highly complex, so Musk explained it to consumers using very simple words and nearly no text on his slides—they were all photos.
“This is how it is today,” Musk began as he showed a photo of a power plant spewing carbon into the air. “It’s pretty bad. It sucks. This is real. This is actually how most power is generated, with fossil fuels.”
Musk continued: “The solution is in two parts. Part one, the sun. We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun. You don’t have to do anything. It just works. It shows up everyday and produces ridiculous amounts of power.”
The previous excerpts returned a score of 2.8. I was skeptical when I saw that the text returned such a low grade level, but once again I had access to my own personal experiment. My oldest daughter had just entered the third grade. I recorded Josephine reading the excerpt. You can listen to her very first attempt here.
Ideas that spread are delivered in simple language and with the fewest possible words. “The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient,” British prime minister Winston Churchill once said. “Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal to greater force.” Churchill, a former journalist, understood that short words would move the greatest number of people.
Super Bowl 50 drew nearly 112 million viewers. The hosts of the Super Bowl pre-game show on CBS had to learn to simplify their words to reach a broad audience. “You don’t have to relearn football when you get this job, because we’ve been around it since we were 12. What we have to learn is how to articulate it in 30 seconds or 10 seconds,” former player Tony Gonzalez said in this Wall Street Journal article. “This is the one game a year they watch so it’s important to keep it very simple so they can at least get pulled in and understand,” former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher said. Football schemes are becoming more complicated, which is why it was important to keep the explanations simple for the widest possible audience.
The trend in football reinforces what I’m finding in the business world. As technology gets more complex, reaching the widest number of consumers requires stripping down the message to simple words.
For the record, today’s column is written in words a fifth-grader can read. That makes it more complicated than Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which has a Flesch-Kincaid score of grade four. You get the idea. Don’t feel as though you’re ‘dumbing down’ language by making it simpler. You’re reaching more people which will help your message stand out.
