Keep It Simple, Sweetie

I haven't had any recent requests to dumb down my content, thank heaven. But what if I decided to write all marketing content at a 10th grade level? As it happens, Word has a language and grammar checker (Flesch Kincaid), which evaluates the grade level of the highlighted content or the document. Theoretically, I could tweak all my work until it was appropriate for 10th graders.

When I looked into the Flesch Kincaid algorithm I was disappointed. As far as I can see, all it evaluates is the length of the sentences, the lengths of the individual words, and the number of sentences per paragraph.

1) The orangutan was encountered by the multitudinous elephantine community. (Woo—Flesch Kincaid grade 19.3)

2) The large elephant herd met the orangutan. (Flesch Kincaid grade 7.3)

I would smack down any English student or content writer who submitted sentence #1 to me, even though its Flesch Kincaid score was more than twice that of sentence #2. Clearly, a higher Flesch Kincaid score does not indicate higher quality.

I would pay good money for a Strunk & White scoring algorithm, though.

Try the Flesch Kincaid scoring system for yourself in Word. Highlight any section of your document. Click , Go through the spelling and grammar check. At the end of the check you get a “readability statistics” box.

In case you’re wondering, this posting scores 8.0.