An interesting post from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs blog, Smart Politics, using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test to analyze State of the Union addresses going back to 1934. Not so much because of the speeches themselves, or the clear trend of crafting speeches to lower grade levels (though those ideas are certainly interesting enough on their own), but just that the notion of writing targeted toward a reading level is one that people don’t often think about, but one that technical writers (really, all writers; those who don’t, should) think about all the time.
Our process (PDF) starts with audience analysis. It’s a lot easier to communicate something if you know who you’re communicating it to, and Flesch-Kincaid is one of the tools that helps us see how easy or hard it is to read text we’ve written. The scale uses word and sentence length to determine the score for a text. More syllables per word and more words per sentence means a higher grade level (or for the reading ease scale, a lower score). You can see the scale at the link.
For instance, paragraph 1 above has a grade level of 24 and a reading ease score of 15. Basically, written at a college graduate reading level. Paragraph 2 above has a grade level of 10 and a readability score of 55 – verging on junior high reading. That makes sense, though: graf 1 is 99 words long, with only 2 sentences. Graf 2 is 89 words, but 5 sentences. As with any equation, there are lots of ways to goose the score, and no method is perfect, but it’s still a helpful tool to assess a written piece.
