Here’s a number that should change how you think about every word on your website, every ad you run, and every social media caption you write:
Over half of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
That’s not an opinion. That comes directly from a Gallup analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, which found that roughly 130 million adults between the ages of 16 and 74 have low literacy skills (APM Research Lab, “Reading the Numbers: 130 Million American Adults Have Low Literacy Skills”). The average American reads at a 7th to 8th grade level according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. And a 2023 update from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) showed that the percentage of adults scoring at the lowest literacy levels actually increased from 19% in 2017 to 28% in 2023 (National Center for Education Statistics, PIAAC 2023).
Read that again. The problem is getting worse, not better.
Now think about your website. Your ads. Your product descriptions. Your email campaigns. How many of them are written like they’re trying to impress a college professor instead of communicating with the person who’s actually going to buy from you?
The Jargon Problem
Let’s make this real.
Imagine you’re a tech company that made a product similar to an Apple AirTag. A small device you attach to your keys or your bag so you can find it if it gets lost. Simple concept. Everyone understands it.
Now here’s how a lot of companies actually describe that product on their website:
“Our IoT-enabled asset tracking solution leverages BLE and GNSS technology to provide real-time geolocation data, enabling seamless device-to-cloud connectivity for enterprise and consumer asset management.”
What does that even mean to a normal person?
Nothing. It means absolutely nothing.
IoT stands for Internet of Things. BLE stands for Bluetooth Low Energy. GNSS stands for Global Navigation Satellite System. These are real technologies. They’re accurate descriptions of how the product works. And they are completely useless in marketing copy because your customer does not care how it works. They care about what it does for them.
Here’s what that same product description should say:
“Attach it to anything. Find it from your phone. Never lose your stuff again.”
That’s a 5th grade reading level. And it sells the product ten times better than the jargon version because the person reading it immediately understands what they’re getting and why they should care.
This is the messaging gap that kills businesses every single day.
You’re Not Dumbing It Down. You’re Opening It Up.
There’s a common pushback we hear when we tell business owners to simplify their messaging: “But our product is technical. Our customers are smart. We don’t want to dumb it down.”
Here’s the thing. Writing at a lower reading level isn’t dumbing anything down. It’s removing friction.
Even highly educated people prefer simpler language. A doctor reading your website after a 12-hour shift doesn’t want to decode complex sentence structures. A CTO evaluating your software doesn’t want to parse through buzzwords to figure out what your product actually does. A busy parent scrolling their phone at a soccer game isn’t going to stop and look up what “omnichannel integration” means.
The Flesch-Kincaid readability formula has been the standard for measuring reading level since the 1970s. It looks at sentence length and word complexity to give you a grade level score. Most readability experts and marketing professionals recommend writing at a 6th to 8th grade level for consumer-facing content (Mailchimp, “Ace the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Test”).
Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea at a 4th grade reading level. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Simple language doesn’t mean simple ideas. It means clear communication.
How Businesses Get Messaging Wrong
We see this constantly with the Utah businesses we work with. The product or service is great. The team is talented. The results they deliver are real. But the way they talk about what they do is so complicated that potential customers bounce before they ever get to the good part.
Here are the most common messaging mistakes we see:
Hiding behind industry jargon
Every industry has its own language. Marketing agencies talk about ROAS and CPA and attribution modeling. Tech companies talk about APIs and microservices and scalability. Health and wellness brands talk about bioavailability and adaptogenic properties and cellular regeneration.
Your team understands these terms. Your customer probably doesn’t. And even if they do, they shouldn’t have to translate your website to understand what you’re offering.
The fix: For every piece of jargon on your site, ask yourself “would my neighbor understand this?” If the answer is no, rewrite it.
Leading with features instead of outcomes
“Our platform features AI-powered predictive analytics, automated workflow orchestration, and real-time data synchronization across distributed systems.”
Cool. But what does it do for me?
“We help you figure out which leads are most likely to buy so your sales team stops wasting time on the wrong people.”
Same product. Completely different message. The second version tells the reader exactly what’s in it for them in language they can process in two seconds.
Writing for themselves instead of their customer
This is the biggest one. Most business owners write their website copy from their own perspective, using the language they use internally. They describe their business the way they’d describe it to a colleague in their industry.
But your website isn’t for your colleagues. It’s for your customers. And your customers don’t think about your business the way you do. They think about their problem and whether you can solve it. That’s it.
Making the customer work too hard
If someone has to read a sentence twice to understand it, you’ve already lost. Every moment of confusion is a moment where they might close the tab, scroll past, or click on your competitor who said the same thing more clearly.
This is especially true on mobile, where most of your audience is reading your content. Small screens, short attention spans, and a thumb that’s one flick away from the next thing. Your messaging has to land instantly.
This Is Why We Built DM Audit
This exact problem is why Hit Select built DM Audit.
We kept seeing the same pattern with businesses that came to us. Their ads were underperforming. Their website wasn’t converting. Their social media wasn’t getting engagement. And in most cases, the core issue wasn’t the platform or the targeting or the budget. It was the messaging.
The words on the page weren’t connecting with the people reading them.
DM Audit is a tool that lets you audit your own marketing and see where the gaps are. It looks at your messaging, your positioning, your keywords, and gives you a snapshot of where things stand. It’s not about vanity metrics or surface-level scores. It’s about identifying the disconnect between what you’re saying and what your customer actually needs to hear.
Because here’s the reality: you can spend $10,000 a month on ads, but if the landing page they click through to is written at a 12th grade reading level full of jargon nobody understands, you’re burning money. The ads aren’t the problem. The message is.
How to Fix Your Messaging Right Now
You don’t need to hire a copywriter or overhaul your entire website to start improving. Here are some things you can do today:
Run your copy through a readability checker
Copy and paste your homepage text into the Hemingway App (free online tool). It will tell you what grade level you’re writing at and highlight sentences that are hard to read. If you’re above an 8th grade level, start simplifying. Use our tool to save even more time.
Read your website out loud
Seriously. Read it out loud. If it sounds like something a person would actually say in a conversation, you’re on the right track. If it sounds like a press release or a textbook, rewrite it.
Replace every piece of jargon with plain language
Go through your site page by page. Every time you see an industry term, a technical acronym, or a word with more than three syllables that could be replaced with a simpler one, change it. “Utilize” becomes “use.” “Implement” becomes “set up.” “Leverage” becomes “use” (yes, again, because leverage almost never means what people think it means in marketing copy).
Lead with the problem, not the solution
Instead of opening with what your product does, open with the problem your customer is experiencing. They need to see themselves in your messaging before they care about your solution.
“Tired of spending money on ads that don’t bring in leads?” is infinitely more effective than “Our data-driven paid media optimization platform maximizes your digital advertising ROI.”
Test your messaging on someone outside your industry
Show your website to a friend or family member who doesn’t work in your field. Ask them two questions: “What do we do?” and “Why should someone hire us?” If they can’t answer both clearly, your messaging needs work.
What This Means for Utah Businesses
If you’re running a business in Salt Lake City, Tooele, Provo, or anywhere in Utah, this applies to you whether you’re a local service company, a tech startup in Silicon Slopes, or an e-commerce brand selling nationwide.
Your customers are real people with real attention spans and real reading levels. They’re scrolling on their phones between meetings, at their kids’ games, in line at the grocery store. They’re going to give your website about 5 seconds before they decide to stay or leave.
In those 5 seconds, your messaging either connects or it doesn’t. It either tells them clearly what you do and why they should care, or it confuses them and they’re gone.
Every dollar you spend on marketing is amplified by clear messaging and wasted by confusing messaging. It doesn’t matter how good your SEO is, how targeted your ads are, or how strong your social media presence is. If the words people land on don’t make sense to them instantly, none of it converts.
The Bottom Line
Over half of American adults read below a 6th grade level. Your marketing copy is probably written well above that. Which means a huge chunk of your potential customers are bouncing off your website, ignoring your ads, and scrolling past your content because they don’t understand what you’re saying.
This isn’t a design problem. It’s not a traffic problem. It’s a messaging problem. And it’s one of the easiest things to fix once you start paying attention to it.
Stop writing to impress. Start writing to connect. Kill the jargon. Shorten the sentences. Say what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters in language that anyone can understand.
Your customers will thank you. Your conversion rate will thank you even more.
Sources cited in this article:
- APM Research Lab. “Reading the Numbers: 130 Million American Adults Have Low Literacy Skills.” https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
- National Center for Education Statistics. “Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2023.” https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/
- National University. “49 Adult Literacy Statistics and Facts for 2026.” https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-facts/
- Mailchimp. “Ace the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Test.” https://mailchimp.com/resources/flesch-kincaid-reading-ease-test/
- The Literacy Project, via Sparx Services. “US Literacy Statistics and Average Reading Level.” https://www.sparxservices.org/blog/us-literacy-statistics-literacy-rate-average-reading-level
Want to see where your messaging stands?
Try DM Audit and get a snapshot of your marketing in about 10 minutes. See what’s working, what’s not, and where the gaps are.
