Does your storytelling need textual healing?

The work of the late, great Marvin Gaye still resonates. You’ve probably all heard his?mellifluous love songs?and beautifully crafted?protest.?

But one of his greatest legacies is the bringing the?song cycle?into popular music: a collection of songs with a unitary, holistic feel. They’re bigger than the sum of their parts.

You probably couldn’t talk this way about most corporate content – and certainly not investment content.

A new research report shows that when award-winning investment management businesses commit their thoughts to paper, no-one can really read it. It’s unreadable.

It’s laden with complexity, with too many long sentences and long words. Its empirical score (of 12.1 readability units, where high is bad and low is good) is far closer to incomprehensible academic papers (13.5) than the very readable financial media (10.4).

That’s not all.

It’s too long: at 1,782 words the average investment thought leadership piece is almost three times longer than a media article (676 words).

People just don’t have the time to read this much. An average person will take nearly six minutes to wade through the average article and they won’t understand 20% of it.

A good place to start writing more readably is with simpler and shorter sentences. English sentences currently average about 14 words. Does anyone really enjoy Dickensian efforts of 35 words on yield curves?

If this sounds familiar. If you work with colleagues who persist in creating unreadable material. And if you’d like to tell your company’s story with more energy and imagination, then why not give us a call?

There’s also loads more data and tips in our research paper: The 2021 Readability Report. You can download it for free at?https://www.communicationsandcontent.com/research/.

You don’t have to wonder what’s going on. Textual healing is available.