"His job is to tell us how to talk to all the dumb people."

[CurtisEdmonds]

The WP on modern business communication:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr22.html

Seventh-graders can read seventh-grade books if you make them, but they don't like to do it. That is because it makes them think too much. It is too hard. So, instead, they like to read things that are written for fifth-graders. If you want seventh-grade kids to want to read all by themselves, you have to give them fifth-grade books! So, Mr. DuBay says that to make most grown-ups want to read something, you have to write it so seventh-grade kids will like it. That means you really need to write for fifth-graders!

Big companies pay Mr. DuBay money to tell them that. Then they do what he says. It is called "effective business communication." "Effective business communication" is a whole lot of great big words that mean talking and writing so other people know what you mean.

I asked Mr. DuBay if it made him sad that people are dumb. He said maybe a little, but that this was just a "fact of life."

[Redlass]

Heaven forbid anyone make an effort to expand one's vocabulary.

[jgibson2[$]]

Even worse if you try to expand someone else's vocabulary. You're likely to end up as a subject for one of Gregory Kane's columns. Gregory Kane teaches at Hopkins, so he can use all the big words he wants to.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Time for an incredibly unscientific study. The following are random quotes from current posts around EA, run through the Microsoft Word Grammar Check Thingie and the results faithfully and accurately reported here without tampering of any kind:

Based on the low standards that the EU, UN, and Arab League place on Palestinian claims of a non-existent massacre in Jenin, I guess this is proof that Abu Mazen isn't entrie clean of ties to terrorism as claimed before?

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.0

Well, I doubt John Ashcroft had anything to do with THAT. He's been too busy running around and telling people to shut up, and taking their guns away, and running illegal searches, for anything like making sure Monica Lewinsky is employed.

10.8

Holy crap!

2.8

Shane wanted to be a friendly giant when he was three, but decided that he wanted to be a garbage truck driver when he was four. By the time he was seven, he had spent several summers playing and working on his granparent's farm and decided that he wanted to be a farmer. He asked me how much it cost to be a farmer and how much he could make, so we costed it out and he realized that he wasn't going to be able to afford it. He asked me how guys who were already farmers were able to get their land and make a living and I told him that most of them were either born into farming families or married someone whose parents owned a farm. He thought about it for a minute and then asked, "Where do you meet girls like that?"

11.2

And now my candy question.... We like to give them a little motivational thing each morning. The math teacher just brought around Blow-Pops with a message that says "Blow the top off of TAKS." I can't for the life of me remember what I did last year. Any ideas for a candy/motivational saying suggestion?

6.7

Image is part of the problem, but nurses do make some of their own problems too. Men find nursing schools, and many nursing jobs to be VERY unfriendly toward them. That's something I never really understood, but I know it happens.

7.2

As Barenaked Ladies said, "Haven't you always wanted a mon-kee?"

8.3

Hey, wait a ding dang minute here, Amy. If you are the porn queen of epinions, what the hell does that make me? I aleady have a queen.

A porn queen can only have so many porn queens. And, assuming you don't live in Utah, I see some obvious discrepancies here.

5.0 - no wonder his epinions are so highly rated by the masses


Believe it or not, the average grade level of these quotes is exactly 8.0. So apparently we're above average.

[conradd]

MJ said in post #4 :
Believe it or not, the average grade level of these quotes is exactly 8.0. So apparently we're above average.

EpinionAddicts.

Where all the writers are strong, the forums are beautiful and all the members are above average.

Deb
having a Lake Wobegon moment

[theeye]

Okay.

I read the article. It wasn't easy. It was, in fact, extraordinarily painful.

Um, sorry. I mean: It made my head hurt. A lot. I did not like it. It was not fun.

Well, gee. No wonder kids don't like to read. If I were forced to read that kind of mind-numbing monosyllabic tripe, I'd turn on the TV, too. Yikes.

Maybe the problem is that no one likes to read seventh grade material. Give the seventh graders some grown-up prose. They might like that better than the fifth grade stuff.

Sheesh.

[CurtisEdmonds]

Oh, it gets worse when we start talking about what kids read.

I will refer you to the great and good Michiko Kakutani of the NYT, who is 1) my favorite book reviewer and 2) hates everything:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/29/bo...=all&position=

Owls are out because some cultures associate them with death. Mentions of birthdays are to be avoided because some children do not have birthday parties. Images or descriptions of a mother showing shock or fear are to be replaced by depictions of both parents "expressing the same facial emotions."

Mentions of cakes, candy, doughnuts, french fries and coffee should be dropped in favor of references to more healthful foods like cooked beans, yogurt and enriched whole-grain breads. And of course words like brotherhood, fraternity, heroine, snowman, swarthy, crazy, senile and polo are banned because they could be upsetting to women, to certain ethnic groups, to people with mental disabilities, old people or, it would seem, to people who do not play polo.

Sounds like a recipe for blandness, right? Kakutani thinks so:

In trying to promote such ideal worlds, censors on the right and left often end up demanding texts that are not realistic, as any child, exposed to television, pop music and the daily hubbub of real life can plainly see. When it comes to the teaching of literature, it can reduce the ambiguities and complexities of art into simplistic social and political messages; it can result in the rejection of classic texts and good writing in favor of boring works, calculated to offend and stimulate no one; and it can result in the selection of works deemed "relevant" to students, instead of works that might broaden their outlook and introduce them to new worlds.

Boo-ya.

[rich2003dm]

I write my stuff like that. But I are not dumb. And I don't think you are dumb. It's just that I talk a lot, and small words let me fit more of them in small places like here.

Rich

[Helen_B[$]]

OMG! I could have sworn that 10 or 15 years ago the reading level of choice to reach the "masses" was grade six.

[jgibson2[$]]

Helen,
I'm pretty sure you're right.

[murasaki]

All Army manuals are written at the 5th grade level. Go figure.

--naomi

[pluckyduck]

!sigh

If we are talking about business communication, I have a lot to say on the subject. Here's my question, though....


Will anybody read it?

I've stripped most of the words out of all of my b to b catalogs. I look for big, bright, colorful pictures. If I position a callout, a few words, by a pretty picture, somebody might read it.

We write the specs but I don't know why we bother because nobody reads them, they just call and ask. Latest catalog, we condensed our font so we could make the pictures even bigger since nobody reads the words anyway.

Internally, I punctuate my email memos with pictures, and beat myself over the head to try to keep everything brief and very simple. I actually plan the memos visually to get people's eye moving through them, hoping that will engage them enough. Fifth grade sounds about right.

Obviously we exist and if we didn't like reading or communicating in writing, we wouldn't be hanging out way too much on a message board. Generally, though.......

Andrea

[jgibson2[$]]

I submitted an article to a nursing journal once. It was accepted. It was edited. When they finished editing, all the sentences were short. They paid me well, but it was not really my work.

[slick4591[$]]

I keep written recipes in my kitchen for employees to follow. I've found that they must be in large font and hung on the wall where the product will be made. They must also be in step-by-step language or something will get screwed up. Even had one lady that didn't know how to read a measuring cup. We bought individual measured cups for her so she would get it right.

[Helen_B[$]]

One of the reasons I took my youngest two kids out of public school was that they were reading way below grade level, and way lower than their level of understanding. However, none of the teachers seemed very excited about this. I remember reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol out loud to the grade seven son, because he wasn't getting it read in school during silent reading time. His teacher insisted that he could read just fine. I realize now that the school's expectations were much lower than mine. I have no idea what his reading level is now, but he's in his second year at University and seems to be catching on. Thank God for the Internet and AOL and subtitled Anime and martial arts movies; that's what got his reading speed up. For those important basic skills, however, he can follow the directions on a packet of Lipton Chicken Noodle Soup just fine. I never realized that reading a measuring cup was an advanced skill.

[rmthunter]

I guess I had sort of understood "the dumbing of America" as an intellectual thing, but it has never really hit home as much as it has reading through this thread. I guess I should have twigged to it when Walgreens et al. started installing cash registers that told the cashiers how much change to give.

Now I really feel like a misfit.

Bob

[mtomm[$]]

Nah, people are not that dumb they are just that lazy.

pluckyduck said

I've stripped most of the words out of all of my b to b catalogs. I look for big, bright, colorful pictures. If I position a callout, a few words, by a pretty picture, somebody might read it.

A picture is worth a thousand words.