41. Simplifying Copy for Functional Illiteracy

In this episode, Samantha discusses functional illiteracy and what it means for how you write marketing copy. 

One in five US adults reads below a fifth-grade level, and even your smartest clients read faster and understand more when your writing is simpler. Samantha breaks down the research on reading levels, where service providers most commonly create friction in their copy, and five specific things you can do today to make your copy more readable and more profitable.

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Hey pals. Welcome back to Copy and the Marketing Podcast where I tell you how to write copy that sounds like you but converts better. Today we're talking about something super fun and uplifting, and that is functional illiteracy. So, fun fact about functional illiteracy. We're gonna get into what it means and all of that, but did you know that one in five adults in the US is functionally illiterate? And what I'm gonna do a really good job of today, I'm pinky promising myself right now, is that this is not going to get political. We are not playing the blame game. What I do wanna do is give you some basic information about functional illiteracy and how to write copy so that every person in your audience understands it. And before you say, "Mm, Sam, but I'm like you, and my audience is professional service providers and really smart people, so I don't need this", I'm gonna ask you to take a pause 'cause we are gonna talk about some startling statistics here today. Okay, so one in five adults in the US is functionally illiterate, and what that comes out to is forty-three million people. So if you take public transit, you would get on a bus, divide that thing into about quarters, and the people in the front left quadrant of that bus cannot read their healthcare prescription. If you were to go to a doctor's office and look around the waiting room, there's four rows of chairs. I'm thinking like the emergency room in The Pit, right, where they walk out and there's like a hundred people in the waiting room. Twenty of those hundred people would be handed a pamphlet about their health and not be able to discern what it says. Functionally illiterate doesn't necessarily mean that these people can't go to the grocery store and read granola on the front of a cereal box. It means that these people can typically sound out words. They have a repertoire of words that they can read. They can often even read sentences, or they might be able to catch some of the words at the bottom of the news when they're, say, on the treadmill at the gym. But they cannot reliably use written text to navigate a daily life. So that is, like I said, prescriptions. Pamphlets tend to be written at a twelfth-grade reading level. And anything that comes from their bank, for example, is probably going to be far above their heads. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, these adults who are functionally illiterate are reading below a fifth-grade reading level. So we're often told in marketing to write at an eighth-grade reading level or below. Sometimes we do hear fifth grade, but for those of us who are doing a lot of writing, especially people with backgrounds in marketing, journalism, or advertising, where we have to read and write very quickly, it's hard for us to reprogram our brains to say what exactly a fifth-grade reading level even is. Also, according to research published by the Barbara Bush Foundation, which you'll remember she was heavily involved in getting the No Child Left Behind Act passed, low literacy rates can cost the US economy up to two point two trillion dollars per year with lost productivity and earnings. This is when small mistakes are made because it's not that they can't read, it's that they cannot understand what they are reading and mistakes are made. This is also why so many jobs are taken by AI, because they would rather have the computer make the mistakes than the people making the mistakes. So today I wanna talk about what this means for your copy specifically, because if you're a coach, service provider, course creator, and you're writing your website, emails, sales pages, and any other type of sales collateral, there's a solid chance that your copy is harder to read than you think it is, and when that copy is hard to read, it is creating friction, slowing people down, and losing their attention so that people jump off of your pages and either stop shopping or go s- shop somewhere else. So by the end of this episode, you're gonna understand some more about what the research says about reading levels and marketing, what service providers like you and I often do wrong, and how to audit your own copy so that more people can read it and therefore buy from you. Okay? Okay. Let's jump in So first of all, what is functional illiteracy? Because people hear functional illiteracy and they assume it doesn't apply to their audience. Like I mentioned, your audience may be full of professionals. I work with a lot of people who are doctors, attorneys, therapists, people who have multiple certifications in what they do. These are professional services providers or business owners, which means we've had to navigate our state's Secretary of State website. Like, that is written at a gazillion grade reading level. So, you may think that your audience is like you, and therefore, they can read. And this is not me proving a point to say that you cannot read at the level that you think you do. It's saying that even you, my sweet, sweet listener, read better when the words are simpler. I'll give you another example right now that has nothing to do with copy is that I'm rereading the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. It was eventually turned into a, I think, show or Showtime series, with Sam Heughan and between reading each of these novels, because these novels are like a thousand plus pages long each, and there's eight of them, and it's a goal of mine to read all of them for the first time this year so I can go back and re-watch the series and then finally watch the series finale. But between reading each of these books, I go back and I read a little palate cleanser, something by Jennifer Weiner, something by Frieda McFadden or something, something that's written in my version of English, American English, 'cause a lot of her books are, Scottish English or... and also old English because they take place in the seventeen hundreds. So I read something that's a little bit more familiar to me. I read books that are a little bit shorter and things that are a little bit more pop culture-y so that I don't have to think about the meaning of the words quite as much. There's a lot of friction. I'm reading her books super slowly, not because I'm illiterate, but because they're just that much more challenging to read. So as you think about this and you think about your audience, know that even if your audience is super smart people, bringing the copy to an easier reading level is going to be beneficial for both you and them and their understanding of what the outcomes are that you provide, and it's gonna make you more sales because you will be giving the vibe that you are simple and easy to work with. Okay? So functional illiteracy, as we're talking about it today, is not a proxy for talking about people and their level of intelligence. It's rather, functional illiteracy is specifically a measure of reading skill, and reading skill is shaped by a lot of things that have nothing to do with how smart somebody is. Like I said, it could be shaped by something outside of themselves, like the school system they grew up in. If they're even reading English as a first language. You're listening to this in English, so we're assuming that you're writing in English, but there are a lot of outside factors, where people were raised, school systems that they were exposed to, reading that they were exposed to growing up, the form of the language, and also learning differences. A lot of people in our audiences have learning disabilities that they may not be aware of. This could include something like ADHD, dyslexia, et cetera. And in fact, going back to where people were raised and how that affects their literacy level in English specifically, is that the National Center of Education Statistics reported in twenty twenty-four that sixty-six percent, so two-thirds, of low literacy adults in the US were not native-born Americans. So to be clear, this is not an immigrant issue, but it's a language barrier issue. And when we are providing services to people who don't speak English as a first language and we're writing copy to them, it again behooves you to reach more people to have more accessible copy that is written at a simpler reading level I also, because I was curious, took a look into current education, and youth numbers are not trending in a better direction in the United States. In fact, about twenty-seven percent of eighth grade students are currently reading below the basic expected reading level. Thirty-nine percent of them are reading below proficient, and that tends to be where education, as far as, how to read starts to level off, because then in high school, anybody who went to school in the US knows that that's less of learning how to read and learning new words. We're not doing spelling bees and language arts as much as we are getting into reading books and, discussing, like, rhetoric classes behind them. So if thirty-nine percent of eighth graders are reading below a proficiency reading level, those eighth graders are going to turn into adults who are also not reading at a super high reading level. Those people will become your clients in five to ten years when they enter the job pool. So then let's take those individuals and set them aside, the people who are reading below a fifth-grade reading level. A study from Nielsen, which is a market research organization, found that the average website visitor reads about 20 to 28% of the words on a page. This typically from a design standpoint means that they're reading your headings, things that are bolded, things that specifically call their attention And those numbers are actually across all visitors regardless of their literacy level. The Literacy Project Foundation puts the average American reading level at about the seventh or eighth grade reading level. So you have people reading at a seventh or eighth grade reading level reading 20 to 28% of the words on any given page Marketing copy tends to be written at a 10th-grade reading level, and technical copy tends to be written at a 12th-grade or higher reading level. Technical copy is gonna be something like your bank statements, a pamphlet that you might pick up at the doctor's office or the community center. And marketing copy is gonna be written slightly below that. That is things like ads, billboards, things you see on Facebook, and websites So like I said, technical copy is written 12th or higher. Marketing copy is written at a 10th grade reading level, and yet the average American is reading at a seventh to eighth grade reading level. So most marketing copy is still written above where your reader is currently sitting So how do we make our copy a little bit simpler? Well, researchers at the American Press Institute found that comprehension drops significantly. Comprehension is what people understand when they're reading. They may understand individual words, but do they understand the message overall? The average reader their comprehension drops once a sentence goes past fourteen words. Under eight words per sentence, comprehension is nearly perfect. So this does not mean that you get to do that ChatGPT thing where you say, "No fluff, no confusion, just vibes," and have these punchy two to three-word sentences all the gosh darn time. No. However, I do want you to be cognizant when you are writing your copy and you start to see that you're building a paragraph, or if you're writing in Google Docs and it becomes two to three lines long, that your sentences are likely getting too long, and they are probably approaching that ten to twelfth-grade reading level when we wanna bring it down to closer to about ten words. This is not gospel. This does not mean you cannot have a sentence over ten words. It just means this is something to look out for as you're writing your own copy. This also shows up quite a bit in sales pages. Sales pages are where people go to make a decision on if they wanna buy from you. They're likely there because they're already warm. They're interested. They either clicked on an ad or an email, or someone recommended that they go there. So they have some level of interest when they get there, and they are reading to figure out if this is the best place to part with their money. However, this is where I tend to see the most dense, complex, freaking, these are all of the nitty-gritty details of this offer type of copy. It's where we get long paragraphs, we get dropdowns on dropdowns on dropdowns of what's included in your modules, et cetera, and, like, what their life is gonna look like day to day to day as they go through your program. It's also where I see a shit ton of industry jargon I especially see this with my financial professionals and my therapists that I work with. This is where they start to name their exact methodologies that they're using and start digging into things like the reports that people are gonna get or especially for therapists where they start naming all of their certifications. Now, especially if you are in a industry that is certified, there is a place on your page for certifications, but I don't necessarily recommend that it's right in the middle of your sales pages when you're trying to build your authority with people. It may build authority with some people, but it's also gonna confuse the shit out of other people. So give it its own section would be my recommendation there So on your sales pages where you have this propensity to write long sentences and have a ton of jargon is a great place for you to take a look at what might be industry jargon and where we can peel that back and dig into feelings. Rather than telling people what is included and what your certifications are, tell people what the results feel like and really start to lean into emotions when you have the propensity to dig into what it is that you offer. The Baymard Institute, which researches e-commerce and conversion, found that dense text presentation is one of the top reasons that users abandon a page. And if you go scroll around, go to the internet, go to Instagram threads, click on a few links in bio, get to people's websites, especially their About pages, hint, hint. We end up over there and see just walls of text. And especially if that's happening on mobile, which has a much smaller screen than when you're looking on desktop, that means that you have a huge propensity to lose people. People tend to read in groups of three, which may mean three lines or three points at a time. So if you have big text blocks on your website, this is a good opportunity for you to scale it back and make it simpler for the brain to process It's not because the text inside of those text blocks isn't good, it's that the formatting may not be working for them, which is again, why we call this podcast Copy because this is copy and design, copy and human psychology and sales psychology, and this is where those two things play really significantly together And to that note about design is that there's something called white space, and white space is where there is no content. Sometimes we wanna fill that up, sometimes we don't. A solid designer who understands sales psychology is going to understand that designing things in short paragraphs with plenty of white space gives the brain time to process. White space is a comprehension tool. So if you're in Copy On Demand and you tell me, or you put a website in front of me and I say, "Hey, we just need to give this some space. We don't need all of this text on the page at the same time," that's an example of me telling you, we need to give people time to process while they're on your site. Give them that millisecond of scrolling as a break from consuming so that they can decide what that text means for them, what that copy really means for them Okay, so we see it in sales pages. Where else do we see an opportunity to co- bring our copy down to a fifth to eighth grade reading level? Honestly, is your email subject lines. Subject lines often fail when there's no context in them. So I see this a lot with, again, coaches and service providers who are brilliant and they've been in their niche for a while, or they're really wrapped up into talking to other people who are already in their niche, or they're coaching clients who have been in their world for long enough that they understand the jargon that they're using. So they tend to write subject lines that reference specific concepts, frameworks, or problems, which may be words that they made up. If you have a signature framework and you're putting that in your subject line, you're likely talking over the heads of your recipients Or if you're using language that only people in your industry use If you are using language that only your warmer audience or people who have paid to be in your world for a while use, you are likely speaking over the heads and beyond the reading comprehension level of your ideal audience for new clients I found a study from MailChimp that analyzed, I don't know, hundreds, millions, who knows, emails that found that subject lines that are clear and specific with words less than eight characters long that are not cute or clever, just focusing on clarity, consistently outperform the ones that are super clever People open emails when they know what they're getting, and they don't open emails when they have to work to figure out if that email is even gonna be relevant to them. When people open their inbox, they're typically bombarded by, like, eight to eight hundred messages all at once, depending on how long it's been since they've last accessed their inbox. If your subject line does not feel relevant to them, it is one of the easiest ones for them to delete and take off their plate. Third place that you can simplify your copy is in your calls to action. Vague CTAs, or calls to action, are also a readability issue just as much as they are a conversion issue. So when somebody reads something super vague, like take the next step or start your journey, let's connect, their brain may, depending on what the copy around it says, have to do inference work or guesswork to understand what that CTA means and where it's going to take them. So when you're writing your calls to action, think about take the next step, like, what is the next step? So instead of saying take the next step, it may say get on my calendar. Or start your journey. Tell them what journey. Like, start your health journey. Start your bookkeeping journey. Become something, right? Or connect with me here might be another great example of saying get on my calendar, schedule your discovery call, something like that. Plain language is competitive language, and you want to be plain and yet descriptive as possible whenever possible. Again, if this feels like a big topic Know that this is something that I have studied. I studied marketing and advertising and international business and all of these classes in school. I studied consumer psychology as part of my marketing degree. This is something that I know I am speaking my language, and I'm trying to simply bring it to your awareness. So as you're listening to this, if this feels like, "Holy shit, I have a lot to do," you've got a couple of options. Listen to this as you're looking through your website and gut check. Do you have big text blocks on your sales page and website? Do your CTAs freaking mean anything? When you look at your last five to 10 emails that you sent, are you using client language or are you using their language? If you're not using client language, go back to one of my episodes about feedback and gaining feedback and how you can use your client voice. That's gonna be a big help. I also have a couple of resources. I have clickable AF CTAs. That is a digital resource where you download it. There's a short training as well as a bunch of examples of really great calls to action that you can swipe. And of course, you can always reach out and work with me. You can grab an hour of my time with Can You Write This For Me at canyouwritethisforme.com. Or if you're thinking that there's a new piece of copy that you would like written by me, go to nomadcopyagency.com/contact and I can help you, okay? So again, I'm here not to overwhelm you, but to educate you and also help you understand that when I say that I have worked with sales psychology and that I have been deep in this world for fifteen plus years since I started my marketing degree, this is just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things that I know, okay? So let's keep talking about functional illiteracy and how you can write simpler copy so that you resonate with your people so that they are super stoked to buy from you I'm gonna give you five action items here of things that you could do. First, super easy, and this is pretty hands-off for you, is to run your copy through a readability checker. I believe the Hemingway app and also Grammarly are both free. Hemingwayapp.com and grammarly.com will give you a grade level score for whatever you paste into it. So if you have an email, copy-paste it over there and let it give you a readability score. Same thing with your website. It's gonna do things like highlight long sentences, flag when there's passive voice or phrases that might have simpler alternatives. That's gonna be your first stop, free, easy to use, takes ten minutes to get checked that something is actually going to be consumed by the people you want consuming it. Again, for most marketing copy, your goal is to get it between a sixth and eighth-grade reading level. Most marketing copy has been studied to be written at a tenth-grade reading level. So also know your audience and know what their jargon is. Like, let's use an example here. For example, accountants speaking to their clients using certain words are going to be jargon. If they were writing the same email to other accountants, that wouldn't necessarily be jargon because those other accountants are in that world all the time. So also knowing what is jargon to your audience is a great place to start. So that's Hemingway and Grammarly. That's a great first place to start. Second thing to do, read through your text and see if you have sentences that are longer than, like, fourteen words. Again, it doesn't mean that you absolutely cannot ever, ever, ever have a sentence over fifteen words. It just means that if something is under fourteen words, the chances of people comprehending it's gonna be higher. Okay? Every word you add after that is probably risky. So look at breaking that sentence up into two sentences or potentially making it into a list Third thing you can do is read it out loud to yourself. I freaking hate this. I remember taking French classes in high school, and we had these PVC pipes that were kind of U-shaped, and we would hold them up to our ears, and we would, like, whisper French to ourselves so that we could hear how we were saying things versus how the recording was saying it. Again, I was in high school in, like, the two thousands. So, like, I'm sure things have come along quite a bit since then, but I hate listening to my own voice. But read your text out loud and see if it makes freaking sense. If not, that's a good opportunity to go back and break things up and make sure that you simplify them. Fourth thing, one idea per paragraph. Another story. I remember going to college. Freshman year, I went to a small liberal arts school that year, and I had to write my first college essay. And I had learned in high school what a standard five paragraph essay was. And what I was taught was that there was an intro paragraph and a conclusion paragraph, and then three paragraphs in between, two of them defending your answer and the third one saying why other alternatives are not viable. And that was the basic structure of an essay. I remember in this class freshman year, we had to write an essay, and we were gonna kind of peer grade each other's essays. And somebody handed me theirs, and it was just, all one run-on sentence of thoughts, and it was so confusing to me. And this isn't to shame anybody who didn't learn to write essays the way in which I learned to write essays, 'cause I think there's a thousand ways to learn the same thing. But that I remember looking at it, and being like, "This is a million ideas shoved, into one piece of paper." And the person had not organized their thoughts whatsoever. So one idea per paragraph here. If you are writing marketing copy, remember that you're not writing academic copy. And that's also why so many of my clients are professionals in their fields, is because they have the humility to look at their copy or look at their writing and say, "Holy shit, the last time I wrote this much was when I wrote my dissertation. The last time I wrote this much, I was writing a product description when I worked in corporate, or I was writing a journal article for something." Right? So they are really freaking great writers. I've had many authors even come to me as clients. Marketing copy is not book writing, marketing copy is not journalism, and marketing copy is not a dissertation. So you're not building arguments across dense paragraphs. However, one thing that does stay the same is that each paragraph should just carry one idea, and then we move on. And then we look at that idea, and we make sure, is this simple? So we want it to be very skimmable because remember, people are only reading twenty to twenty-eight percent of words on a page anyway. And final thought here, fifth thing, replace jargon with the problem that it solves. So this one is huge for coaches and service providers. You have language for what you do. You have potentially a named framework or a methodology that you have trademarked. You have industry terms that you're using constantly. But remember, when you are reaching people for the first time, they don't know what the heck your super cool framework is. They need you to describe what your super cool framework does for them. So as you're going through your copy and you think that you have run into a piece of jargon, see if you can change it from what you do to how it impacts them A really good example of this is with my coaches and my therapists that I work with. They will often say something like nervous system regulation. To somebody who is really freaking unregulated, that's gonna sound so far out of reach. But what you could do in that situation is rather than have this jargon of nervous system regulation, pair it with something like, So that you can learn what it feels like when your body isn't constantly in fight or flight." Translate what you do for people when you're thinking of using jargon Okay, as we wrap up, I want to touch on one thing because, again, a lot of us work with really freaking smart people, and if you're listening, I think you're really smart. So a worry that I've run into with clients before is, "Sam, this is so freaking simple that I don't know if I've lost my credibility. Do I look like less of an expert because I have simplified my copy?" And the answer here is no. The research does not support the idea that complex language equals expertise to buyers If anything, it signals effort to the reader, and effort equals friction. If they have to work harder to read what you wrote, they are more likely to bounce than buy. A study from Princeton University found that information presented in a harder-to-read font was actually signaled as being less credible than the same information in an easy-to-read font. So again, this is copy and design. This is sales psychology and copy. This is copy and that's why you're listening here. So make sure that you are making something as easy as possible to process, whether that's from a design perspective, a copy perspective, or a jargon perspective. Okay? Your expertise lives in your ideas and your ability to create a transformation for your readers. The most authoritative communicators that I know, and the ones who convert at the highest rates, write the way that they talk. They are clear, they are specific, and they know where their power lies, and that it lies in their ability to create change for their readers So readable copy does not equal dumbed down copy. It's copy that respects the heck out of your reader's time and attention and their cognitive bandwidth. And given that the average person is only reading a fifth to a quarter of your page anyway, you want every single word you write to land. So to recap, 43 million US adults are functionally illiterate, and even if we're assuming that none of your clients fall into that group, it behooves you and your client for you to write simpler so that you are being more respectful of their time and helping them understand exactly how you can help them create the change that you offer in their lives. You are making it so freaking easy and rolling out the red carpet for them to work with you And to do that, you are making your copy feel simple and understood. If you need help with this, you can reach out to me at nomadcopyagency.com/contact, or you can go to canyouwritethisforme.com. Additionally, I will make sure that my template shop is linked below in case you wanna do it yourself, but just with that little bit of help from something that's already written I hope that you take 10 minutes today to go back and look at your website, look at your emails, and see where you can make them even simpler, and try it in the next email that you write. See if it gets more clicks. See if it gets more opens, and shoot me an email and let me know if that's what you experience I'll see you next week