Show note · Mar 2026
The Hemingway test, and the word that means nothing
Two exercises from episode 27 with Dayana Kibilds: one that shows you how hard your pages are to read, and one that shows you how little they say.
On episode 27, Dayana Kibilds described an exercise she does with every new higher-ed client: paste your financial-aid page into the Hemingway app. Most come back solid red. A wall of complexity.
Then those same institutions wonder why first-generation families aren’t finding them.
Exercise one: the Hemingway test
Pick the three pages that matter most (admissions, financial aid, apply) and paste each one in. If the grade level is above 9, you have a problem. Not because your readers are stupid. Because the stakes are already high, and you are adding cognitive load at the exact moment someone is trying to make a life-shaping decision.
Complexity is not a sign of rigor. Clarity is.
- Replace passive voice with subject-verb-object.
- Delete adverbs.
- Break paragraphs into two-sentence pairs.
- Read every sentence out loud.
Exercise two: search for “community”
Now pull up ten college or university homepages at random and search each one for the word community. You will find it on every single one.
A word everyone uses identically is not a brand. It is background noise. This was the other half of the conversation with Dayana, and it is the one that stings, because “community” is usually deployed by people who genuinely mean it.
The problem is not sincerity. The problem is that sincerity expressed in the same words as everyone else’s sincerity is indistinguishable from marketing.
What to say instead
- Name the specific, weird, actually-true thing your community does. “Students heckle each other’s theses in the dining hall.” Not: “We value collaboration.”
- Replace nouns with verbs. “Community” becomes “we argue hard in public.”
- Show it through one moment, one photograph, or one rule that could only be yours.
Both exercises are really the same test in different clothes. One asks whether anyone can read you. The other asks whether anyone can tell you apart. Most institutions are failing both, and the fix for both is the same: say the specific true thing, in plain words.
Dayana is the author of Mailed It., which does for institutional email what Strunk & White did for the paragraph. Recommended.
