Congress Getting Stupider According to Flesch-Kincaid Scale

"An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale—best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software—reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline."

Read the full story here: Congress is Getting Stupider