Having difficulties trying to get people to understand you?

One way to get your message across in a more effective manner is just to simplify what you’re trying to say. Cut the jargon, use simpler words, and you’ll be surprised how much more receptive your audience or readers may be. This is often simpler said than done, and for that reason I introduce to you… one of my favorite pieces of writing freeware – Bullfighter.

Bullfighter was released in 2003 by Deloitte Consulting, to help with better writing but has since been released for free to the public. What it is really, is a Microsoft Office add-in for Word and Powerpoint which will analyze your work, tell you how complex it is, and potentially help you simplify and make it better.

For example, after I had recently finished a report, I ran the Bullfighter add-in which then analyzed my work and confirmed that my document had no jargon (bull-free).  In case you’re wondering – yes you can add your own jargon to the list of words Bullfighter will mark down as ‘bull’, so its really quite flexible in that respect.

Bullfighter also analyses sentence length, and syllables per word to help ensure waffling is minimized.  On top of that, it also gives you something called the Flesch score. This famous test was designed in the 1960′s and is still relevant today, and is used to indicate comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of English. Higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark “more difficult to read” passages.

• Where a score of 90″“100 means that it is easily understandable by an average 11-year old student
• 60″“70 would easily be understandable by 13- to 15-year old students
• and 0″“30 would be best understood by college graduates

To give you an idea of what that means, according to Wikipedia:

Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30′s.

So as you can see, a low score doesn’t necessarily mean a bad score – it just means that it’s better understood by a wider audience, which in most cases – is a good thing.

Finally, Bullfighter also comes with a nifty online tool called the ‘Mystery Matador’ which helps you to analyze and anonymously send scores by email to some of your friends or colleagues who just love to ramble on and on. All you need to do is copy and paste their letter or any other document text in the mystery matador. Bullfighter will measure the jargon and verbosity, and send an email with a link to their score for free.

Do you use other cool writing tools? Would love to hear your thoughts!