What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

conversation: I’m sitting down with you to tell you what I know.
Conversations have rhythms. You emphasize a word here, you speak a
word softly, there. There are pauses. The speed of one sentence sometimes
changes from the previous. All of this is difficult to reproduce in print, if
all the text looks equal. So I use italics, I use dashes, I use parentheses, I
use color, etc. to reproduce in print—as much as I can—the rhythms of
natural speech.
Finally, I guess some of my spelling (and capitalization) is weird. (You
say “weird”; I say “playful.”) I sometimes like writing it as “email,” for
example, but other times I feel like writing it as “e-mail.” Fortunately,
since this is my own book, I get to play by my own peculiar inclinations
and playfulness; I’m just grateful that ten million readers have gone along.
Nothing delights a child (at heart) more, than being found at play.
—Dick Bolles
P.S. Over the last forty years a few critics have complained that this book
is too complicated in its vocabulary and grammar for anyone except a
college graduate. Two readers, however, have written me with a different
view.
The first one, from England, said there is an index that analyzes a book
to tell you what grade in school you must have finished, in order to be able
to understand it. My book’s index, he said, turned out to be 6.1, which
means you need only have finished sixth grade in a U.S. school in order to
understand it.
Here in the U.S., a college instructor came up with a similar finding. He
phoned me to tell me that my book was rejected by the authorities as a
proposed text for the college course he was teaching, because (they said)
the book’s language/grammar was not up to college level. “What level was
it?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “when they analyzed it, it turned out to be
written on an eighth grade level.”
Sixth or eighth grade—that seems just about right to me. Why make
job-hunting complicated, when it can be expressed so simply even a child
could understand it?