Even in Congress, plain talk is not dumbing down
So members of Congress talk like 10th-graders? That was the gist of the headline on an online NPR story recently. The piece also said that speeches in the Congressional Record have declined by one grade level since 2005. You might think that means Congress is getting dumber, but you would be wrong.
The data come from a report by the Sunlight Foundation, which presented its trend chart under the headline “The dumbing down of Congress?” The foundation uses technology to promote government accountability. It ran 16 years of speeches through the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula, which estimates the years of education needed to easily understand the material.
In the newspaper business, where I come from, the Flesch-Kincaid test is used to make sure that content is acessible to the broadest possible audience. In other words, low grade levels are good. This column, for example, tests at grade 9.4.
Austrian’s plain talk
Rudolf Flesch was the Austrian immigrant who developed the test in the 1940s. His formula used word and sentence length to arrive at a readability score. Then it was tested on people with different levels of education to find what level of readability was appropriate for each year of school.
Today it is called the FleschKincaid test because of Peter Kincaid, the professor at Central Florida University who redid the grade-level norms for the U.S. Navy in 1974. The Navy had feared that its training manuals were too difficult for recruits.
The Sunlight Foundation found that the greatest variance in congressional scores came on the Republican side, where Tea Party freshmen were among the plainest speakers. The best, at eighthgrade level, were Reps. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., and Rob Woodall, R-Ga. On the other end, the GOP had four-term Rep. Dan Lungren of California. According to the test, you needed 16 years of school to understand him easily. For the Republicans, members with the most conservative voting scores made the clearest speeches. There was no such connection among the Democrats.
Tea Party success
Do you see a pattern here? Perhaps the Tea Party’s success in the 2010 election had something to do with its members’ ability to connect with a broad audience. Or maybe they never go beyond the simplest talking points. In Flesch’s view, writing below an audience’s capability was a good thing.
When I tested a small sample of newspapers, I found those writing at the lower grade levels, compared with educational attainment in their communities, got more per thousand circulation for their advertising.
In that study, I applied the Flesch-kincaid test to some wellknown historical documents just to give editors a feeling for its meaning. John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” scored at 10.3. William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “I decline to accept the end of man,” came out at grade level 8.8. And Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech was a very accessible 6.6.
There are several computer algorithms for calculating Flesch-Kincaid, and they give somewhat different results.
You can test your own writing with the one in Microsoft Word. It’s an option inside the spell checker. And if you get a low score, don’t think it means you’re dumb. It just means you are a good communicator.
See if you can beat my 9.4.