Level Sticker Waveline Wedge

If you need to write some copy (for a website, book or brochure) I’ve got a simple tool to make your words so much easier for people to read, twenty five years ago a little red sticker changed my life, there’s a clever way to generate electricity from waves and a really beautiful home in Greece that’s built into a hill.

The first thing is a graph that shows the literacy rates between adults in the USA ages 16 – 74. In that age group 4 percent of them are illiterate, 14 percent are below basic reading level, 34 percent are at a basic reading level, 36 percent are at an intermediate reading level and 12 percent are proficient.

Now, what does all that mean for you when writing copy? That means more than half the adults in the United States are reading at a seventh-grade and below reading level, while the other half are reading at eighth grade and above. Why is that important? If you can write for the lowest grade level possible (while still getting your ideas across to your audience) that’s going to make it easier for everybody to read and I’m going to show you how to figure that out.

There is a tool that I use to figure out the reading level of my writing and it’s called the Hemingway app. The website address is hemingwayapp.com and when you load the home page you’ll see some sample text and on the right-hand side it says that the readability is at grade six. A few of those lines of text are highlighted and each color means something (the legend is on the right). What you do now is you delete that sample content and paste your content in the same spot and the website is going to analyze it and give you the readability grade score and indicate a few things that you should work on.

To show you a few examples, I copied out some text from some popular books. Turns out that the first few paragraphs of Fahrenheit 451 has a readability of grade eight, and you can see that three out of the seven sentences are hard to read (they are highlighted in red). So there’s a few things that could be improved to get this score lower.

Let me show you a few more examples of how this works.

The first few lines of The Great Gatsby are at a grade 12 level. One of those sentences is highlighted in red, here it is “In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgment, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me a victim of not a few veteran bores.”

Even when I’m reading it, it’s slow, and it takes a lot of mental processing power, a lot of energy to process that sentence. Imagine if you wrote paragraphs and paragraphs like that, people are going to tune out, people are going to click away, they’re gonna close the book. 犀利士 So, try to get that grade level lower.

Let me show you one more example, then a really cool thing.

The first few paragraphs of Animal Farm are at a grade level 9 which is better than The Great Gatsby but not as good as Fahrenheit 451.

My wife and I were writing some copy for a landing page recently, and my wife realized something very interesting. If you’re familiar with Tony Robbins (he’s a life coach kind of guy) and he has his live events posted on his website. There are pages for each event, and one of his events is called “Unleash the Power Within.” We actually went to this event over a decade ago, and it was fantastic. If you are going to go to a Tony Robbin event, that is probably the first one you are going to go to. Here’s the first paragraph of the introduction for that event:

“Someday is now. Claim the life you were made for. We’ve all done it. You’ve told ourselves that someday we’ll heal the relationship, lose the weight, start our dream business, find our soulmate. We wait for the right time and let our circumstances determine our future.”

It keeps going on a bit more but you get the idea but something amazing happens when I paste that into Hemingway – those words are at a 3rd grade reading level. That means that the majority of adults that look at those words will be able to read it and understand it and not be frustrated and want to bail.

But that’s not the interesting part!

Tony has another event called Business Mastery. This event is for business owners and when you’re a business owner you probably have a higher level of reading comprehension than the average person. Here’s some of the text from the introduction of that event:

“Grow your business by 30% to 120%. We don’t live in the same world that we lived in at the beginning of the year. And if your business isn’t keeping up with this rapidly changing world, you risk being left behind. In this time of upheaval, during this economic winter, you can either get caught in the storm and suffer, or you can use this time to innovate, create, and master your skill set to launch into a thriving and successful future.”

Let’s see what happens when I paste that text into the Hemingway App – that text is at a 10th grade reading level. Most of the text is highlighted meaning that the Hemingway app thinks there is room for improvement. The people who are going to be reading this text are going to be at a higher reading level than the average person and that’s why I recommended you “Write for the lowest grade possible for your audience.”

If you know that your audience is made up of business owners or super science geniuses, you don’t have to bring it down so low because you know they can process and understand bigger words.

If you have a business website, run some of your text through this Hemingway editor and see what the grade level is. And then try and change some of those words to decrease the grade level to make it easier for people to read.

Talking about grade level, let’s talk about school!

I posted a rather interesting picture on Instagram recently, it was a photo of my high school ID. It had the normal things like high school colors, mascot, my name and photo but in the top corner was a small red sticker that said “Internet User.”

Around 1996 (or so) the internet was just a baby and there were only a few computers in the school library that could access the internet and you had to get approved to use those computers.

The internet was apparently a super scary thing at the time!

I don’t remember the exact process that happened to get approved, but I did and the librarian put this little “Internet User” sticker on my ID.

That sticker got me interested in the internet and around the same time, my friend Peter and I used to take day trips to New York City. It’s not like this anymore but a really cool thing at the time in Manhattan is that you used to be able to buy bootleg software on the streets of New York City from guys that were selling software discs laid out on blankets. Keep in mind that there was no internet based authentication (like you have today) because the internet really wasn’t a thing yet. You could buy a CD disk with the application you wanted and it would include a little piece of paper with an unlock key. You could take the disc home and install the application using the same unlock key that everyone that bought the software used. It was a wild time!

I remember this so clearly… I bought the Microsoft Office 98 disk which came with Microsoft FrontPage 98. FrontPage 98 was an HTML web editor, and that was the start of me learning how to make websites.

I played around with that software for probably six years or so, until I got really good at making websites. Once I felt confident in my skills I started to apply for jobs at local web design companies – that was when I first started to make money on the web. That first website sale led to the second sale and third sale and since then… making websites is how I’ve earned money my entire adult life.

About eight years after those first few sales (around 2009) I taught my wife everything I knew about making websites. From that point on my wife and I started working together building websites. In 2015 we bought a house in Florida and in 2020 we rented out that house so we can travel around the world together.

I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t gotten approved to use the internet back in high school.

It’s fascinating to think that something so tiny had such a significant impact on my life. What about you? What are those seemingly insignificant things from 20 or 25 years ago that made a big change in your life?

Let me describe an incredible device that has been created by swel.eu. This device floats on the top of the ocean and consists of a bar in the middle with floating planks connected horizontally. I’m not sure about the size of it, maybe around forty feet long. The planks on the sides move up and down with the waves, generating electricity through attached arms. This device harnesses the energy from the ocean, which I think is a significant resource that is currently underutilized.

There might be ecological issues like barnacles or animals obstructing its functioning. I also wonder why they didn’t incorporate solar panels on the stationary middle piece. Nonetheless, I love this idea, although it’s not yet in production.

Speaking of electricity, let’s consider how to transfer it from the ocean to a usable location. While I’m unsure about the technicalities of how they do it, let’s imagine building a home far off-grid, isolated from other people. That’s where Mold Architects in Greece come in.

They designed a structure called “Encaved,” which is built directly into a hillside. The house is seamlessly integrated into the slope of the hill, with nothing sticking out. This home design is probably great against hurricanes and tornadoes, not that they’re prevalent in Greece. The house blends beautifully with its surroundings, featuring a stunning pool and abundance of trees.

At night, only one other house can be seen in the distance. Although electricity would be essential in such a location, the architecture and aesthetics are truly captivating. The house has clean lines, modern materials like wood, brick, and glass, and strategic openings to allow natural light into the underground spaces. The staircase is particularly remarkable, with plank-like steps extending out from the wall. Architecturally, the house resembles a wedge nestled into the hillside. While I’m not an architect, I find this design absolutely incredible, especially considering the remoteness of the location and the absence of nearby civilization.