What you say is no more important than how you say it. After all, if what you say is incomprehensible, then your idea has little or no effect.

Unless you’re trolling science websites, you probably didn’t see the press release, “Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar.”

So what? Nothing you can do about it? Well, a lot of those poor readers are the prospects you’re targeting with your advertising. So are you wasting your marketing money?

Newspapers, our traditional method for keeping up with events since Colonial days, are supposed to be written at a level the average 14-year-old (eight grader) can understand. That may be true of local papers, but even the “everyman’s paper,” USA Today, scores at a tenth-grade reading level.

Yet an adult literacy study conducted in the U.S. in 1993, found the average adult reading ability is at the eighth-grade level. The recent press release mentioned above indicates that score hasn’t improved.

Back to your marketing materials.

How easily can your customers or members or prospects understand your promotional materials or the communications you send them?

Direct Mail Marketing (really, all advertising) should be written in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone. That’s probably an eighth grade or less reading level.

You’re thinking, “I can’t run my marketing copy through some expensive, time-consuming testing bureau.” You don’t need to. If your copy is in a Word document, you adjust the spell-check setting to give you a Flesch-Kincaid grade reading level score for the document.

For readability, there’s nothing more important than short sentences and everyday language. You still follow all the rules for sentence structure and punctuation, but you cut out all the “big” words, complex sentences, and poorly explained ideas.

Even if we’ve in the Information Age, there are still plenty of individuals — your potential customers — who aren’t skilled readers. You don’t need to dumb-down your communications. You simply need to make a sincere effort to communicate better.

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Here’s more about the Flesch-Kincaid Readability rating.

The press release, “Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar,” was found on the ScienceDaily website.

The study I referred to is the 1993 National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

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Here are some statistics you might enjoy:

Average reading grade level scores for

• USA Today…10th
• Wall Street Journal…14th
• Newsweek…11th
• New York Times…10th

Average reading grade level scores for

John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Clive Cussler novels…7th