Aspiring to the 9th Grade Level, or, How Simple Language Will Reclaim Our Knowledge

15. January 2009 by Jennifer Dunn Saunders.

In last week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore had an article called “The Speech.”  While the article was mostly about how the majority of inaugural addresses suck aren’t very memorable, she touched on something called the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test.  You may have seen this sucker floating around on the ‘net at one time or another, but to sum it up, the Flesch calculator is intended to calculate at what grade level a text reads. (And no I’m not giving you a link so you can test your stuff until the bottom of the post. I know you. Keep reading!)  The Flesch takes factors like average number of words in a sentence, sentence length, syllables in words, etc. and, for us writers, supposedly tells us what grade level our work is meant for.

And it drives me crazy. 

Who died and said that writing a bazillion word sentence with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious shoehorned in three times makes your writing more worthwhile than someone who writes in a clear, concise, readable style?

Let’s consider this excerpt from anthropology. I won’t say I hate most anthropology writing, only that I’m horribly disappointed in it. (Oh, who am I kidding? I despise most anthropology writing like a bride despises the husband she caught cheating on their wedding night. Clearly, this stems from a semester of graduate study toward an anthropology degree.) But I digress. The below text is taken from an abstract of an anthropology paper. No, not the paper itself. The summary.

“The author begins by locating the thesis in the corpus of anthropological literature which acknowledges human suffering and refuses to adopt a position of cultural relativism. The complex and elusive phenomenon of structural violence is unpacked, followed by a description of the setting and the author’s methodology. Clinical observations are presented as contextualised narratives located around three themes: alcohol misuse; gendered violence; and inter-generational violence.” (Roberts, Anthropology & Medicine, 2009.)

This bad boy scores a 21 on the Flesch scale. As high school grads would read on a 12^th grade level, and people with Bachelor’s degrees on a 16^th grade level, I can only assume that this is meant for someone in the eleventybajillionth grade. (Darn, even with that awesomely long word, this paragraph only reads on a 9^th grade level.)

My point is that just because a document is long and full of fifty cent words it isn’t automatically worth more than say, a joke, or a slogan, or a song lyric that gets to the heart of a matter in a few words.  Regular people deserve to understand inaugural addresses, mortgages, and diagnoses. And the subjects of anthropological study damn sure deserve to understand what is being written about them by outsiders. At the risk of sounding like a raging populist, I find it disingenuous (50 cent word alert!) that certain writers try to preserve knowledge for themselves by holding it hostage with polysyllabic shackles.

I want to end with a couple of Flesch grade level scores:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  (1^st grade)

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (Kindergarten)

And here’s the link to the Flesch calculator I was using. Try not to tear your hair out. (This post? 8^th grade.)

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