41. Simplifying Copy for Functional Illiteracy

Okay.

So one in five adults in the US is functionally illiterate, and what that comes out to is 43 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, 100 people in the waiting room.

20 of those 100 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 12th-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 y'all remember she was heavily involved in getting the No Child Left Behind Act passed, low literacy rates can cost the US economy up to $2.2 trillion 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.