114 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
Jobs, Gates, and the Plain English Test
Seattle Post Intelligencer tech reporter Todd Bishop wrote a clever
piece at the urging of his readers. He ran the transcripts from
four presentations in 2007 and 2008 (Steve Jobs’s Macworld key-
notes and Bill Gates’s Consumer Electronics Show presentations)
through a software tool that analyzes language. In general,
the lower the numerical score, the more understandable the
language.
Bi shop u s e d a n on l i ne s of t w a r e to ol prov ide d b y Usi n g E n g l i sh
.com.^3 The tool analyzes language based on four criteria:- Average number of words per sentence.
- Lexical density—how easy or difficult a text is to read. Text
with “lower density” is more easily understood. In this case,
a lower percentage is better. - Hard words—average number of words in a sentence that
contain more than three syllables. In this case, a higher
percentage is worse because it implies that are more “hard
words” in the text that are generally less understood by the
average reader. - Fog index—the number of years of education a reader
theoretically would require to understand the text. For
example, the New York Times has a fog rating of 11 or 12,
while some academic documents have a fog rating of 18.
The fog index simply means that short sentences written in
plain English receive a better score than sentences written
in complicated language.
It should be no surprise that Jobs did noticeably better than
Gates when their language was put to the test. Table 10.1 com-
pares the results for both 2007 and 2008.^4
In each case, Jobs performs significantly better than Gates
when it comes to using terms and language people can eas-
ily understand. Jobs’s words are simpler, his phrases are less
abstract, and he uses fewer words per sentence.