Making the Grade

Press release authors face many challenges while writing material. As a PR pro, making complicated news easy to understand is part of your job.

The readability of your news is extremely important. Your press release needs to make sense to all of your potential readers. The words and phrases in it should be clear and to the point. Make it your goal to identify and eliminate language that could confuse your readers or complicate your message. Keep your releases concise and free of excess jargon and hype.

That’s where David Meerman Scott and the Gobbledygook Grader step in.

I’ve followed David Meerman Scott for quite some time now. I honestly can’t tell you how many times I’ve read his e-book The New Rules of PR over the years. If you haven't heard of him, check out his blog WebInkNow.

He launched the Gobbledygook Grader with HubSpot. The program allows users to cut and paste text from an original document and receive a grade on the material they’ve written. It’s specifically targeted toward PR professionals and is a great tool for analyzing press releases.

I urge you to visit the website and submit your text. You’ll receive an immediate report containing statistics, suggestions for improvements, an overall grade and readability rating for your press release. The report also points out what it refers to as Gobbledygook words and phrases.

According to Meerman Scott and Hubspot, Gobbledygook words are overused words that lack specific meaning. I referred to them as hype words in this post. You can find a list of the top 25 Gobbledlygook words of 2008 here.

If you want a more traditional readability evaluation, look into your Flesch Reading Ease score. If you’re a Microsoft Word user, you will see this score immediately after running a spellcheck. Your score will appear in a pop-up box along with your word, sentence and paragraph counts. If you don’t use Word, I’d suggest using this online readability index calculator.

The Flesch Reading Ease score calculates how difficult (or easy) it is to read and comprehend a selection of text. It takes into consideration the average number of syllables per word, words per sentence, and sentences per paragraph, and generates a score anywhere between 0-100.

Here’s a chart breaking down the range in scores:

As you’ll notice, the higher the Flesch readability score, the easier the text is to read. According to the above chart, a standard score is between 60 and 69. For press releases, I’d recommend aspiring for a score somewhere between 30 and 60.

Press releases tend to have lower Flesch scores due the demanding topics they cover. Their score also suffers from an abundance of proper names, abbreviations, and quotes. Don’t be alarmed if your score falls below 30.

It’s important to remember that you should only use your readability score as a guide. These scores are NOT perfect. In fact, they often vary slightly from program to program. They are, however, valuable tools that can help writers simplify their work.