Writing for readability makes it easier for prospects to respond favorably.

An important thing to remember about newsletter marketing copywriting (and editorial writing as well), copywriter Steve Sahlein liked to say, is that what extensive reading reminds the business executives who are your typical prospects: School. And what they remember about school is that they didn't like it.

So, Steve suggests, unless you are writing for an audience of librarians, editors or other "pedantic types," strive to keep your prose clean, simple and easy to read.

(Dan Ranly, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, put it in a slightly different way at last year's NEPA conference. He said not to write for the audience he was currently addressing--editors, people so caught up in reading and writing that "we read everything in front of us, even if it's only the small print on the milk carton.")

Here are several ways to improve the readability of your selling copy.

Keep 'em short

Use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs.

Craig Huey, who has won as many marketing awards as anyone (32 in his current NL/NL ad), recommends that 60 to 65 percent of all words in a sales-letter be five letters or less.

Short paragraphs. Make the majority of them six or seven lines long at most. But don't make the page an unbroken succession of identical grafs. Break up the parade once in a while with a two-liner and you can let one stretch to 10 or 12 lines. Otherwise, your page tends to look, as my grandfather would have said, as if the paragraphs were Dutch soldiers and you were Kaiser Wilhelm.

Short sentences, my personal favorite. In marketing copy I shoot for an average sentence length of 15-16 words. Sentences of 20-22 average word length bring you into the realm of bureaucratise (so much for short words) and 25+ into the realm of academia.

Try this. An occasional very short sentence brings down your average nicely. This discipline will also root out parenthical elements and dependent clauses. My college lit professor who revered Faulkner and Henry James might not approve. They weren't writing selling copy.

The Fog Index

Or, to get serious, calculate your Fog Index. Developed many years ago, the Fog Index is said to calculate the number of years of education necessary to easily read a section of copy.

Here's how. Take a section of copy. Most of a page is probably good. Determine the average sentence length. Count the number of three-syllable words per hundred words. Add these two figures and multiply by 0.4.

The result is the number of years of education necessary for easy reading. For example, Milton's Paradise Lost scores 26 years and the Gettysburg Address 10 years.

Is this bilge? We understand that the Wall Street Journal, whose readers must be college graduates on average (16 years), aims for a Fog Index score of 11 on the front page.

Again, obviously short words are helpful in dropping a Fog Index score. I've always felt at a disadvantage in that much of what I have written, words like newsletter, salesletter, marketing, copywriting and publishing both run up the Fog score and are hard to avoid.

Practicing what I preach 

The March 16, 2004 issue of NL/NL was lying on my desk and the DM Notebook in it, "What to do when your price is going up--eight guidelines," seemed typical of what I write.

For the first 300 words (297 actually), I had 18 sentences for an average of 16.5 words each. (A couple of backbreakers should have been broken up, but five at 11 words or less brought down the average nicely.)

And, in this section, we have 39 three-syllable words, an average of 13 per hundred words (and 12 of those 39 were my hard-to-avoid ones mentioned above). Do the math. A total of 29.5 times 0.4 yields a Fog Index score of 11.8 Not too bad.

My conclusion is that just making the effort to check this sort of thing in your writing yields a benefit in discipline which will improve clarity and readability. (Twenty-eight words with that sentence is an embarrassing conclusion.)