How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Published 1936 · 79,200 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Self-Help, Psychology, Nonfiction
How hard is How to Win Friends & Influence People to read?
How to Win Friends & Influence People scores 13 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 18 out of 100
- Carnegie writes in everyday conversational English, with short words and business anecdotes anyone follows. It sits close to Atomic Habits in plainness and well below literary fiction.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative, with direct address ('you') and bulleted principles. The syntax is simpler than Beach Read's.
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Every principle arrives with a concrete anecdote about a salesman, a customer, or Lincoln. Like Atomic Habits, it grounds psychological ideas in examples.
- Information density: 25 out of 100
- Thirty principles spread across about 80,000 words, with heavy repetition and illustration, make for a light load. Each chapter makes one point and restates it.
How How to Win Friends & Influence People is regarded
How to Win Friends & Influence People holds a literary regard score of 42 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.