Is Tenth-Grade Level Obama Too Smart or Too Stupid for America?
Adam Frank, writing for NPR, complains about a CNN report suggesting that President Obama’s recent speech on the oil spill might have been “pitched over the head [sic] of the American people,” because it required a tenth-grade level of comprehension. According to CNN analyst Paul J.J. Payback: “Obama’s nearly 10th-grade-level rating was the highest of any of his major speeches and well above the grade 7.4 of his 2008 ‘Yes, we can’ victory speech, which many consider his best effort…. The scores indicate that this was not Obama at his best, especially when attempting to make an emotional connection to the American people.”
The idea that the President would be speaking at a seventh-grade level drove Dr. Frank crazy. “Treat people like they are too dumb to handle these issues and you ensure that a real discussion can never happen,” he wrote.
I write to disagree with Dr. Frank in the strongest terms. Using simple language clearly and well is the mark of a sophisticated writer and speaker, rather than the reverse. If the President resorts to simple language, maybe that isn’t because he wants to make sure that the dumbest among us will get what the hell he is saying; maybe it’s because the simplest language is also the most beautiful, and the most effective. We may forgive Dr. Frank (whose own blog post on this subject clocks in at a ninth-grade reading level, by the way!) for not knowing such a ton about writing or oratory, because he is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. (I kid!)
So where do these grade-level scores come from, anyway? I do not know exactly how Mr. Payback arrived at his score, but generally it is a good bet that these scores are the results of the widely-used Flesch-Kincaid¹ readability test, which computes average sentence length and number of syllables per word in order to arrive at a grade-level figure, as follows:
FKRA = (0.39xASL) + (11.8xASW) − 15.59
Where,
FKRA = Flesch-Kincaid Reading Age
ASL = Average Sentence Length (i.e., the number of words divided by the number of sentences)
ASW = Average number of Syllables per Word (i.e., the number of syllables divided by the number of words)
Quite a rough calculation, it would seem, and an unlikely indicator of subtlety, effectiveness or elegance. It bears mentioning, though, that writing instructors and manuals generally seek to help you to lower your Flesch-Kincaid score rather than raise it, in order to improve comprehensibility. This, after all, should surely be the overarching goal of public speaking and writing. Media figures often try to scare us with these really somewhat meaningless grade-level stats in that sneaky “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?” manner, but English should be crystal-clear, first and foremost. If it is, that means the writer or speaker is smart, not dumb.
Microsoft Word is equipped with an automatic Flesch-Kincaid calculator. I tried a few well-loved writers on for size, sampling just a few pages.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road 4.6
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters 3.5
David Foster Wallace, “Good People” 7.5
David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” 11.0
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 12.0
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys, 5.4
And how does The Awl stack up, I wondered? Here are the results for a few recent articles.
The Machines: 8.7
Rich People Things: 12.0
Childlessness is Awesome and I Love It: 12.0
Mild Dread and Some Aversion in Aspen: 10.3
Oh dear. (I kid again!)
¹ Rudolf Flesch, later the author of Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955).
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and