Your readers are smart people. That doesn’t mean you should strive to use big words and complex constructions in your writing. Smart writing is clear writing, and that means simple writing.

Most newspapers and magazines are written for a 9th or 10th grade reading level. Why? Because these publications want their writing to be quickly and easily understood, with a minimum of confusion.

Simple writing is not about “dumbing down” your ideas. It’s about making them easily accessible to as many people as possible. Simple writing won’t make you look like a neophyte; it will give your ideas power, helping them spread faster to more places. If you want people to talk about your book, they have to understand your content and be able to describe it to their friends in a few sentences.

Avoid industry jargon and business buzzwords. Nothing locks people out of a conversation or makes their eyes glaze over faster than a paragraph crammed with acronyms, insider terms, and words larded up with extra syllables in an effort to sound lofty. Businesspeople, I’m looking at you. Cut wastage, drop utilize, and forget orientate when waste, use, and orient will do the trick.

Write like a human being. If you’re struggling to convey a big idea in plain words, ask yourself what you would say if you were having coffee with a friend. This friend knows you — there’s no need to puff yourself up to impress her. But she doesn’t know your area of expertise — so skip the industry shorthand. Your imagined conversation should help you with phrasing, flow, and word choice.

What Does Complexity Cost You?
This blog post started out as an entirely different article. I wanted to write about a new technology I’d heard about called SharedBook. I first read about SharedBook on Mike Shatzkin’s blog. The capabilities of the technology, as described by Mike, sounded really interesting:

This is a wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. With wikipedia, the edits and annotations from “the crowd”…actually change and revise the content itself. With SharedBook’s annotation technology, the original published content remains locked, and the changes are appended as footnotes! The footnotes can be associated to a chunk, a paragraph, a word, a symbol, a diagram, a picture. Whatever you like. And using the capability to manipulate content into a one-off book that SharedBook is known for, a reader can order up a printed book with whichever of the footnotes the reader wants in their own copy of the book.

So off I went to the SharedBook website to learn more. After five minutes of poking around, I was no wiser than when I had arrived. This is a sample of what I found:

One of the unique aspects of this data integration involves mapping the data into a rich data model that allows flexibility for clients, partners and users to collaboratively manipulate the data in a client-supplied environment.

Huh? Tell me what you mean, man. I think the above sentence is trying to say the same thing that Mike said. But which one do you understand?

Whether writing a website or a book, have a human conversation with your readers. Cut the jargon and the fancy words. It’s all about the simple.

Amazon today unveiled a new addition to its Kindle line of e-reading devices, the Kindle DX. The most notable feature of the DX is its larger screen size — nearly 10″ on the diagonal versus the Kindle’s 6″ screen.

Amazon is touting the device as a comfortable reader for newspapers and text books, as well as e-books. Three major US newspapers — the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post — have signed on to offer subscriptions at reduced prices.

The Kindle DX is priced at $489, $130 more than the Kindle. And yet, apart from the larger screen size, there’s not much more to love. It’s still a black-and-white display. There’s still no ePub or WiFi support.

Early reactions to the release of the DX has been lukewarm at best. Here’s at peek at some of the commentary from the publishing world circulating on Twitter this morning:

SmartBitches: Dear Amazon: please, keep it coming. I’m enjoying this way too much. I can has moar fail plz? Kthxbye!” #dud #amazonfail

paperhaus: Wondering why Amazon bothered with Kindle 2 at all. It’s not like they cooked up a 8.5×11 screen in 2 months.

ljndawson: $489 Kindle with 16 shades of grey and no discounts on subscriptions if you’re in the paper’s area = lead balloon. #dud

wmacphail: The Kindle needs to be WAY cheaper. Apple is going to kick this thing’s ass.

sarahw: Not getting over the $489 price tag. In a recession. Two months after Kindle 2 unveiled. Like reissuing bare-bones DVD w/ one or 2 extras.

kirkbiglione: No ePub, no WiFi. Kindle closed system continues and it won’t hurt Amazon one bit.

Only time will tell whether consumers agree and bypass the DX, or whether the large screen size will prove an enticement.

I just can’t stay silent about this any longer. Sometimes I shake my head in disbelief. Sometimes I’m frustrated. Always I wonder, what the heck?

My astonishment has to do with Twitter and the people who don’t identify themselves there. I’d like to say, “You know who you are,” but I’m not so sure that statement is true. Because surely if you knew how hard it is to find out anything about you, you’d make some easy changes to your profile.

For the record, it doesn’t matter to me how you use Twitter. If you want to lock your tweets so that only your friends can see them, fine. If you’d like to use a pseudonym and a picture of your dog so no one knows who’s really doing all that tweeting about Dancing with the Stars in the middle of the workday, knock yourself out. I’m not talking about you, the casual users.

No, I’m talking about the people who want to make professional connections on Twitter. The people who want to network. The people who want to promote their books, their services, their websites and blogs. (And, ahem, the people who request to be in directories because they want to be found.) If you are on Twitter to connect with people, then you have to let them know who they are connecting with.

Seems pretty straightforward, yet I’ve lost track of the profiles I’ve seen that are missing really important information.

I’ve visited the Twitter profiles of people who have told me they are authors and have not been able to figure out the person’s name or the name of their books or one thing they write about. How are people supposed to find your work to become readers and fans?

I’ve clicked through to Twitter profiles of people who have told me they are publicists for hire (publicists!) and have not been able to find any information about their company, the services they offer, or where to get more information. How are people supposed to hire you?

Your Twitter profile gives you the chance to identify and promote yourself. If you don’t complete your profile, you’re not helping yourself. But more than that, you’re not helping the people who would like to know you, talk to you, and potentially spend money with you. Don’t think that completing your profile is being too “sales-y.” People are trying to make a decision about whether to follow you. Give them the information they need.

If you’re on Twitter to network, here’s what your profile should include:

• Your real name, especially if it’s different from your Twitter handle
• A good photo of you. Not your cat, not a sunset, and definitely not the default brown Twitter square — the real you. People connect with other human beings. It’s hard to network with a sunset.
• A link to your website or blog. Warning! A web link is a supplement to, not a replacement for, a Twitter profile. And be careful about linking to a blog if the blog doesn’t orient visitors upon landing. I’ve clicked through from incomplete Twitter profiles, hoping to find more information on the website, only to land on a blog that doesn’t tell me who the blogger is or what the blog is about.
• A bio that provides a snapshot of you who are and what topics you’d be interested in connecting over. Think in keywords. “Living on the edge” doesn’t say a thing about you or why people might be interested in following you. Authors, include book titles if you can.

Did you know that when people roll over your name in a Followers list, your bio appears in a pop-up? When I scan lists for new people to follow, I do the roll-over trick. It saves me from clicking through to every profile. If the bio seems interesting, then I’ll click through to see more and maybe follow. No bio, no pop-up, no click-through, no follow.

A good profile works in your favour. HubSpot analyzed Twitter data and discovered that users with a bio have 8 times the number of followers than those without a bio. Profiles with web links had 7.5 times the number of followers compared to those without links.

Take advantage of the Twitter profile. People will thank you with follows and conversation.