In simple terms, readability refers to a tool that helps you with your writing. Some people call it a ‘readability checker.’ Officially, it’s the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. A readability checker scores your writing. (Don’t panic!) It simply looks at your writing from a couple of different angles, sentence length, difficult words, and so forth, and scores it for…readability. The scores roughly correspond to a grade level comprehension. For example, former President Obama’s speeches, generally scored at 60 or above, which corresponds to about an eighth grade reading level. It’s fairly widely accepted that a score of 60 and above is an ideal target for most business writing. It’s important to understand that this is not a dumbing down of language. You could make the argument that it’s the opposite. Simple, clear language can be incredibly difficult to achieve. 

What are the benefits?

By scoring your writing, you do two things. First, you help yourself stay on track. Second, you raise the odds that your audience will fully get what you’re saying. Let’s say you’re working on an email or a memo, or even more critically, packaging information. And it’s a complicated story and it’s important that your audience understand it all. You finish it and score it. Then you see that it scores in the 30s or 40s. That’s a snapshot of what’s going on and a strong indication you’ve got a draft that is pretty hard to understand for most people. As business writers our first job is to reach people. We have to persuade them. If our audience can’t understand what we’re saying, we’ve lost them. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument. Don’t let it rule your life. 

How do I use it?

A readability widget is embedded in Microsoft Word. In preferences, Spelling > Grammar, make sure that the ‘show readability statistics’ box is checked. From that point on, when you use the Spelling & Grammar tool, you’ll get a score. There are many free online readability checkers. 

Here are two. ProWritingAid has a free version that includes a readability score. Readability Analyzer is a free, web-based readability checker.

1. ProWritingAid – the best grammar checker, style editor, and editing tool in one package.]

2. Readability Analyzer

This text scored a 60.9 in the Microsoft Word readability checker. In the ProWritingAid tool, it scored a 65. Huzzah! 

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KITTIES FOUND ABANDONED IN BALTIMORE!

But she’d already been abandoned. We’d found her, my wife and I, with her mother or sister, we’ve never been certain about the relationship, under a marble stoop in Baltimore in March of 2007. She was this big. She and her mother were incredibly beautiful. Part Bengal, friends told us. It was cold outside. They were hungry.

Early days they lived in our basement. We wanted to give them some time to adjust to their new world and also, to let everyone get acclimated. We had a Bichon-Frisse, Chester—the undisputed King of the Hill. On my visits to the basement, Ellie would sit on me and dangle her little feet over the edge of my arm. My wife says the look on my face when that kitten would sit on me was something she’d never seen before. We named them Ella and Billie. Cats from the streets of Baltimore, they sang for their supper, two artists of the floating world.

{Ellie on the bed, Capitol Hill, Seattle (c) Richard Pelletier}

We owned a big, three-story house back then with two staircases, one front and one back. Which meant Ella and Billie would race up the front stairs all the way to the third floor, climb our drapes all the way to the ceiling, (nine feet high) shimmy back down and then race down to the first floor via the back stairs. Every once in a while, Ellie would try to sit on the top edge of a hanging picture frame. CRASH!

They hunted rats out in the backyard, they slept, they ate, they shit. They were mad about watching water drain out of the tub. Moving water was like some kind of apparition for both of them. D’you see that?? The fuck is that?? Billie was sphinx-like, she could sit in one position for hours at a time. Ellie was restless; she lived for the edge. I was out in our backyard in Baltimore one day when I heard her crying. I couldn’t see her anywhere and kept trying to place the sound. Then I saw. She had climbed the fire escape of a shit, mostly abandoned apartment building two doors over. Nine apartments, eight of them empty, all in various states of urban horror. She was in the window, up on the third floor unable to get out. Screaming her head off. When I got to her, (no small feat) she was racing around the room in circles in a full-blown panic. The carpet was covered — and I do mean covered, as in several inches thick — with broken glass and hypodermic needles. I managed to snag her and get her into the cat carrier and got her safely home. The next adventure was in the other direction and involved fire escapes and extremely large dogs. It wasn’t long after that she got a uterine infection, nearly died, spent a week on IV at the vet, where they put a leather mask on her head, because she was an absolute terror to deal with as a patient. (Linda’s theory is that this vet visit was so traumatic, it changed her for life. Probably true.) She began to stay closer to home, where Chester would hump her every chance he got.

THE KING OF THE HILL SUCCUMBS, HIPSTERS IN PORTLAND

A few years later, we moved across the country to Portland, OR. We put the girls in cat carriers and drove them to the airport. We told them we’d see them soon, sent up a prayer and crossed our fingers. They were bound for Kitty Kat Kondos in Portland. We were headed to Maine, other parts of New England, a bit of Canada, then all the way across the country to Portland. In Maine, our dear little Chester — an old man by now — succumbed to his advancing years and died in Linda’s arms. ‘Guys, I am not moving to fucking Portland.’ Before he went, she carried him along a river bank in the New England afternoon light so he might catch one last breeze. In our house right now, somewhere, is a little wooden box with a little metal plaque on it. Chester.

This was early fall, 2008. In the time of Obama. In the time of the oil boom in the Dakotas. In the time of blue flames and westerns skies lit by oil wells. As we crossed the Dakotas in the middle of the night, we played Native American radio, and the two of us banged on the doors and the dashboard in delirious unison with Indian drummers. Under the stars we barreled west toward our new home and our girls.

The day that Linda brought them home, a month after we’d dropped them at the airport in Baltimore, they climbed out of their carriers, sniffed around for a while, checked out the rooms. Okay, this is good. I see my old pillow over there. How long before we get to go outside again? When’s dinner? Where is Chester? 

{Ellie, helping out in the office in Portland (c) Richard Pelletier}

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]ortland was uneventful, placid even. Naps and hanging out and neighborhood explorations. No abandoned tenements, no rats. It was Portland. Nothing happens in Portland except for beer and pot, food and bands. Ellie would wander, and Linda would walk the neighborhood calling her name, “Ellie bell! Ellie bellie!” and finally she’d prance into view and let herself be carried home. One morning saw a standoff between Ellie and a family of raccoons, but the situation resolved itself peacefully.

{Ellie and me, nap time, Portland (c) Richard Pelletier}

In 2012, Linda and I separated. I went to Seattle for a job, Linda stayed in Portland. I would take the cats. And one fine day, after I got settled, Linda drove the three hours to my apartment with the girls in the back seat, yelling all the way. By the time she got to my place, Billie was foaming at the mouth, and if memory serves, she’d shit herself along the way.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]llie lost her mind. Her new home was a studio apartment. I went to work every day, a 45-minute drive to hell and back (I wrote copy for a company that made child safety seats for cars) during which I’d alternate between weeping and listening to NPR. And then I lost my job, and I was home. Me, Billie and Ellie. We were all miserable. Ellie yowled. And yowled and yowled. And yowled. The sounds she made broke bone. She made EXTREMELY LOUD sounds I’d never heard before. She couldn’t go outside, and there was no Linda, her entire world had disappeared. She’d start at 4 am, and she could go — on and off — until 11 am — seven hours later —when she’d collapse in exhaustion. I terrorized her to shut her up. I’d apologize. I’d walk the streets to get away from her. I spent untold hours in cafes. At night she climbed up onto the bed to sleep right near my head, like always. If she didn’t reach her little paw out to touch me, I’d reach my paw out to touch her. It was a crazy kind of love. The only way out of the pain is to go through it, I’d tell her. We prayed for better days.

{Ellie, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. Capitol Hill Seattle (c) Richard Pelletier}

I spent my days and nights trying to figure out where everything had gone wrong.  At one point, I discovered that if I didn’t move, and tried to stay out of sight, Ellie would calm down. Don’t move. (I’d have been wise to discover this trick a lot earlier for the sake of my marriage.) Then I found The Good Wife on Netflix. So there I was, in the middle of the day, recently fired, separated from my wife and friends, frozen to my couch, (don’t fucking move!) binge-watching Peter Florick and Alicia Florick negotiate Peter’s lying, infidelity, cravenness, job loss. All of which bore discomfiting similarities (minus prison, politics, prostitutes) to my own circumstances. I found a therapist who listened to all my sad stories. “Richard,” she said, “life is yes and no. You’re missing the ‘no’ part.”

When I heard about those other scandals, the other wives… I thought… how can you allow yourself to be used like that? And then it happened, and I was… unprepared. ~ Alicia Florrick

You have to control the narrative. ~ Peter Florrick

I tried to write; I tried to work. But with Ellie, nothing was possible except minimal survival. Either from exhaustion or luck, she slept at night but woke around four or five in the morning, and her bone breaking howls would begin again. So I fantasized about taking her out. Literally. This went on for a year. And then another year.

Linda and I reconciled in 2013. Over the course of the next two-plus years, we tried to live with Ellie who had seriously gone bonkers. For a while, my workaround for her 4 AM meltdown was a pair of foam earplugs. On top of which I placed a pair of old-school type headphones plugged into my iPhone which was tuned to chanting. So as Ellie began her bone shattering songs, jumping on and off me in the dawn, I was swept away to a stone chapel filled with bald headed monks singing. I experienced the deepest sleeps of my life in those mornings. I was in heaven.

Then we drugged her.

URBAN KITTIES IN THE WILDS

Soon after we drugged her (miraculous transformation btw), we moved to Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle. Ellie was free again. And then she brought us mice and moles and snakes…and one day, a hummingbird. (‘Those you don’t hunt Ellie.’) She was in heaven.

{Ellie’s new home, Whidbey Island, WA (c) Richard Pelletier}

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]he traveled to the outer edges of our quite rural property which is three plus acres, it’s big. All went surprisingly well. Over the last year or so, we’d worked out a routine, and it ran like clockwork. We kept her in at night because we have coyotes and owls and eagles and they eat kitties. But a  couple of times the routine broke — she didn’t come home at night. Linda and I would stay half-awake the whole night, listening, waiting, miserable with worry. As morning broke, she’d prance in to our bedroom, chatting away, looking for breakfast.

At night in bed, as we read, Ellie would sit by Linda’s pillow. Her nose was aimed at Linda’s cheek. Same position every night.

Then one night it happened again. She didn’t come home. And we thought, ‘ah, she came home last time, probably all good.’ But this time, Ellie did not come home. A day passed. And then another. And then another. And now, more days than I can count have passed, and she has not come home. The space between our pillows is quiet, empty. We don’t hear her breathing, we can’t hear the little whistle of air singing through that little nose, telling us we are all here now, the three of us, and we are sleeping.

I wouldn’t a done it, Ellie. Couldn’t a. Never.

{Ellie ~ 2006 – 2018 (c) Richard Pelletier}

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If you’re coming into this series of blog posts on storytelling in business, you’ll probably want to head over here >>
I love this quote by Robert McKee so much, I’m posting it again…

The moment a story appears in front of audience members or readers, they instantly and instinctively inspect its value-charged landscape, seeking an emotional door into the story, a place to stick their empathy.” – Robert McKeee

In this episode, we’re going to go into something I find fascinating; the thing that starts it all, the thing that screenwriters call ‘the inciting incident.’ Here’s how McKee defines it.

Excerpt from McKee:
The inciting incident launches a story by upsetting the equilibrium of the protagonist’s life and throwing the story’s core value either positively or negatively, but decisively out of kilter. This turning point initiates the events that follow and propels the protagonist into action.

Excerpt from John Yorke’s Into the Woods:

All stories have a premise — ‘What if….?’

A stuttering monarch takes instruction from a colonial maverick…
A slum dweller from Mumbai is accused of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?…
A junk-collecting robot is whisked away from his home planet…

An inciting incident is always the catalyst for the protagonist’s desire. It might be useful to think of them as the subject of a film’s trailer: it’s the moment the journey begins.

Yorke goes on to say that the first attempt to codify the inciting incident, or incidents, came in 1808 courtesy of A. W. Schlegel, who called them ‘first determinations.’

When you think of certain well-known films, the inciting incident can be fairly easy (though also quite tricky) to spot. From one of my favorites, The Verdict, here’s a thought about what’s happening around the inciting incident.

Excerpt from Christopher Lockhart’s blog, The Inside Pitch:
For physical/external storyline: MICKEY jolts GALVIN into consciousness, reminding him that he has five-days to prepare for the ONLY case on his docket. This is a definite money-maker that will ensure GALVIN some much needed income (page 6-7).

For psychological/internal storyline: GALVIN visits his comatose client in the nursing home. He comes to understand the severity and enormity of the case before him (page 8).

Notice what’s being said in the above excerpt: for the physical/external storyline…and for the psychological/internal storyline….two worlds operating here, inside and outside…

INCITING INCIDENTS IN BUSINESS STORIES

Excerpt from Scientific American, by Umair Irfan: 

At 10:21 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2013, about a minute after all 183 passengers and 11 crew members from Japan Airlines Flight 008 disembarked at Boston’s Logan International Airport, a member of the cleaning crew spotted smoke in the aft cabin of the Boeing 787-8.

Soon after this event, the FAA ground the entire BRAND NEW fleet of Boeing aircraft. Suddenly, Boeing was in a world of hurt — deep inside that turning point that initiates all the events that follow–in this case smoking lithium batteries. I know about this story because I had to write about a consulting team that worked on this problem. Every imaginable element of good storytelling was available to work with… But the ‘incident’ that launched the story? Overheating, smoking lithium batteries.

Excerpt from New York Magazine piece, by Yashar Ali:

That first (John) Carreyrou story reported that Theranos’s blood-testing machine had significant accuracy issues and had been used for only 15 out of a claimed 240 tests. Subsequent stories revealed that the machines never really worked, would often malfunction, and could lead to inaccurate diagnoses. Today, the investors are gone; Holmes and the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, Sunny Balwani, who was also her secret boyfriend at the time, are both facing federal criminal investigations, and they have been charged by the SEC with running an “elaborate, years-long fraud.”

The publication of a Wall Street Journal story about serious problems at a Silicon Valley startup–Theranos–was the inciting incident in a cascading nightmare of revelations and crises that would lead to the near total collapse of a completely fraudulent company that had raised $900m from investors. Absolutely amazing story.

Those are high-profile, well-known, public stories. But think about these quieter stories that happen every day:

An administrator at a large university healthcare system is promoted to a position with much more responsibility, and she is not entirely certain she can pull it off. On her own, she contacts an old friend of her father’s, a retired management consultant who coaches her on the quiet. The inciting incident is the new job — the turning point that initiates a series of events that follow…The antagonists in the story are the bureaucracy, and her own self-doubts.

A successful chef-restaurateur opens a new, and fairly large restaurant operation in the midst of an economic crisis. His funding is razor thin. The launch has to succeed right out of the gate because he needs that money to pay rent, vendors, all the rest. He hires a chef to run his kitchen, hires a catering team, servers, a manager; he works with his PR and marketing partners and opening day arrives. Six months in, the chef is declared a failure and is fired. The checking account is on empty. The first review is decidedly ho-hum, if not outright hostile. The chef dons his whites, sharpens his knives and returns to the kitchen, something he has not done in years. He saves the restaurant, and sets it on a profitable footing that supports the establishment for years and at the same time, develops a management and funding framework that serves him well as he opens three more restaurants in the coming years. The inciting incident? The chef who failed and put the entire enterprise at risk.

Thanks for reading, more storytelling for business to come.

Illustration: Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent Van Gogh

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he moment a story appears in front of audience members or readers, they instantly and instinctively inspect its value-charged landscape, seeking an emotional door into the story, a place to stick their empathy.” – Robert McKeee

Have to say, I love that quote. It reminds me of the film The Verdict, by Sidney Lumet, starring Paul Newman. A washed-up, alcoholic, ambulance chasing attorney, goes into battle with the medical and legal establishments to try and deliver old-fashioned justice to the family of a woman who died while in hospital. What a story.

So we’re into our sixth post on Robert Mckee’s book on storytelling and business, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World. In this section, McKee gets into laying the groundwork for how stories are made. As to audience, he writes that fiction writers and comedy writers have well-tuned antennae for how to reach their audience. In marketing, it’s different and far more demanding. (No kidding.)

Some of this material is, well, bloody obvious, and I’m going to bullet point some of the text.

Subject matter for a story contains three major components: a physical and social setting, a protagonist, and a core value.

World-building is storytelling’s critical second step. The weakest choices of all favor the general over the specific.

TIME

McKee is weak here. A definition of time in storytelling needs to be a lot stronger than a few crumbs about duration and location. Time is a hugely important consideration in fiction, far more important that McKee suggests. In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber writes, ‘…a story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate. Where the teller begins and ends a tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning. Yogi Berra’s famous bit of hope about a ball game—it ain’t over till it’s over—is the storyteller’s dilemma. When is it over?” This is exactly right and as I read those words I think of my friend John Simmons book, Spanish Crossings, which is about time as much as it is about love and honor. Back to McKee.

SPACE

Excerpt from McKee

Two dimensions structure a story’s space: Physical—the horizontal landscape and every object in it. Social—the vertical hierarchy of a society’s pyramid of power and the possibility of movement up or down.

THE CORE VALUE

Excerpt from McKee

“…a setting does not become three-dimensional until the teller adds substance in the form of values. As mentioned in chapter 3, in everyday conversation, when someone says an individual or institution has “values” he means positive qualities such as truthfulness, love, generosity, hard work, loyalty and the like. But for the story-maker, the values he invests in his telling come not as singularities but binaries of positive/negative charge: truth/lie, love/hate, generosity/selfishness, hard work/laziness, loyalty/betrayal, life/death, courage/cowardice, hope/despair, meaningfulness/meaninglessness, justice/injustice and the list goes on.

 A telling may incorporate any number, variety, and combination of values, but it anchors its content in one irreplaceable binary—the story’s core value. This value determines a story’s fundamental meaning and emotion.

More to come, thanks for reading.

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