Speech Registers At Eighth Grade Reading Level

You can call it the "dumbing down of America."
Or, you can call it "making yourself perfectly clear."
No matter what you call it the fact is that a scientific test has shown that President Obama's State of the Union Speech last night registers at an eighth grade reading level.
This, according to the University o0f Minnesota's Smart Politics which conducted an analysis of the speech using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.
The "Flesch Formula" is a way to measure how clearly and simply something is written -- whether it is easily understandable. The lower the Flesch score, the lower the reading level.
Obama's State of the Union last night registered the third-lowest Flesch Formula score of any State of the Union address since 1934.
The Flesch Formula considers length of sentences and words, among other factors.
Each of Obama's three addresses are among only seven of 70 in the modern era that were written shy of a 9th grade level, and among the six that have averaged less than 17 words per sentence.

The lowest Flesch score was attained by President george H. W. Bush in 1992 with a speech that was written at a reading level of 7.5 (seventh grade and six months). The second, third and sixth lowest all came from Obama in 2011, 2012 and 2010 respectively.

Click here for more.