"My Message is Simple (minded)": Obama's SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year

You expected a Churchillian language level?

"My Message is Simple": Obama's SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year - Smart Politics

By Eric Ostermeier on January 25, 2012

Obama's SOTU addresses have the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score of any modern president; Obama owns three of the six lowest-scoring addresses since FDR.

For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms.

And for the third straight Address, the President's speech was written at an eighth-grade level.

In Obama's own words: "My message is simple."

But was it too simplistic?

A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama's 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level.

Obama also delivered the second lowest scoring address in 2011 (at an 8.1 grade level) and the sixth lowest in 2010 (at an 8.8 grade level)

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