Presentation-Secrets-Of-Steve-Jobs
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114 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE<br />
<strong>Jobs</strong>, Gates, and the Plain English Test<br />
Seattle Post Intelligencer tech reporter Todd Bishop wrote a clever<br />
piece at the urging of his readers. He ran the transcripts from<br />
four presentations in 2007 and 2008 (<strong>Steve</strong> <strong>Jobs</strong>’s Macworld keynotes<br />
and Bill Gates’s Consumer Electronics Show presentations)<br />
through a software tool that analyzes language. In general,<br />
the lower the numerical score, the more understandable the<br />
language.<br />
Bishop used an online software tool provided by UsingEnglish<br />
.com. 3 The tool analyzes language based on four criteria:<br />
1. Average number of words per sentence.<br />
2. Lexical density—how easy or difficult a text is to read. Text<br />
with “lower density” is more easily understood. In this case,<br />
a lower percentage is better.<br />
3. Hard words—average number of words in a sentence that<br />
contain more than three syllables. In this case, a higher<br />
percentage is worse because it implies that are more “hard<br />
words” in the text that are generally less understood by the<br />
average reader.<br />
4. Fog index—the number of years of education a reader<br />
theoretically would require to understand the text. For<br />
example, the New York Times has a fog rating of 11 or 12,<br />
while some academic documents have a fog rating of 18.<br />
The fog index simply means that short sentences written in<br />
plain English receive a better score than sentences written<br />
in complicated language.<br />
It should be no surprise that <strong>Jobs</strong> did noticeably better than<br />
Gates when their language was put to the test. Table 10.1 compares<br />
the results for both 2007 and 2008. 4<br />
In each case, <strong>Jobs</strong> performs significantly better than Gates<br />
when it comes to using terms and language people can easily<br />
understand. <strong>Jobs</strong>’s words are simpler, his phrases are less<br />
abstract, and he uses fewer words per sentence.