Does Your Copy Have a Z-Score Problem?
Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs in 1919. Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001. If you only looked at the number, Bonds wins. But the game changed, longer seasons, smaller parks, livelier balls, and, let’s just say, different nutritional choices.
The question isn’t who hit more, it’s who was more extraordinary for their time. That’s where our good friend the z-score comes to compare apples to oranges.
A z-score tells you how far above or below average something is for its group. Most scores fall between -2 and +2, with 0 being dead-average.
Barry’s home run z-score? About 3.4.
Babe’s? 5.7 — off the charts.
Now, what’s that got to do with fundraising copy?
The Copywriter’s Z-Score
We use z-scores to compare your writing to the gold standard of great fundraising writing: the personal letter. It’s how we know whether your copy feels readable and human or dense and academic. No need to do the math. Here’s what matters:
If your z-score for these parts of speech is above +1, your copy’s getting heavy.
How Many Is Too Many?
Real Example: Nouns Gone Wild
One year-end appeal we analyzed had 32 nouns per 100 words. That’s a z-score of 3.9 against our full corpus and 6.2 against the personal-letter benchmark. Translation: unreadable.
To fix it, the writer would need to delete or replace about 10–14 nouns per 100 words to remove the massive friction between your donor and your message.
Dense writing doesn’t just slow the reader; it increases their mental transaction cost. The harder it feels to read, the less likely they are to act.
You can’t guilt someone into finishing dense copy. You can only make it easy, cognitively easy, to read and care.
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
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