The Flesch–Kincaid readability tests are readability tests designed to indicate how difficult a passage in English is to understand. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Although they use the same core measures (word length and sentence length), they have different weighting factors. 
 
 The results of the two tests correlate approximately inversely: a text with a comparatively high score on the Reading Ease test should have a lower score on the Grade-Level test. Rudolf Flesch devised the Reading Ease evaluation; somewhat later, he and J. Peter Kincaid developed the Grade Level evaluation for the United States Navy. 
 
 History [ edit ] 
 
 "The Flesch–Kincaid" (F–K) reading grade level was developed under contract to the U.S. Navy in 1975 by J. Peter Kincaid and his team.[1] Related U.S. Navy research directed by Kincaid delved into high-tech education (for example, the electronic authoring and delivery of technical information),[2] usefulness of the Flesch–Kincaid readability formula,[3] computer aids for editing tests,[4] illustrated formats to teach procedures,[5] and the Computer Readability Editing System (CRES).[6] 
 
 The F–K formula was first used by the Army for assessing the difficulty of technical manuals in 1978 and soon after became a United States Military Standard. Pennsylvania was the first U.S. state to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level (14–15 years of age) of reading difficulty, as measured by the F–K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.[3] 
 
 Flesch reading ease [ edit ] 
 
 In the Flesch reading-ease test, higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark passages that are more difficult to read. The formula for the Flesch reading-ease score (FRES) test is 
 
 206.835 − 1.015 ( total words total sentences ) − 84.6 ( total syllables total words ) {\displaystyle 206.835-1.015\left({\frac {\text{total words}}{\text{total sentences}}}\right)-84.6\left({\frac {\text{total syllables}}{\text{total words}}}\right)} [7] 
 
 Scores can be interpreted as shown in the table below.[8] 
 
 Score School level Notes 100.00-90.00 5th grade Very easy to read. Easily understood by an average 11-year-old student. 90.0–80.0 6th grade Easy to read. Conversational English for consumers. 80.0–70.0 7th grade Fairly easy to read. 70.0–60.0 8th & 9th grade Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students. 60.0–50.0 10th to 12th grade Fairly difficult to read. 50.0–30.0 College Difficult to read. 30.0–0.0 College graduate Very difficult to read. Best understood by university graduates. 
 
 Reader's Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, an average grade six student's written assignment (age of 12) has a readability index of 60–70 (and a reading grade level of six to seven), and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is 121.22, (i.e., every sentence consisting of only one one-syllable words). "The cat sat on the mat." scores 116. The score does not have a theoretical lower bound; therefore, it is possible to make the score as low as wanted by arbitrarily including words with many syllables. The sentence "This sentence, taken as a reading passage unto itself, is being used to prove a point." has a readability of 74.1. The sentence "The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature." scores 37.5 as it has 24 syllables and 13 words. While Amazon calculates the text of Moby Dick as 57.9,[9] one particularly long sentence about sharks in chapter 64 has a readability score of −146.77.[10] One sentence in the beginning of Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust, has a score of −515.1.[11] 
 
 The U.S. Department of Defense uses the reading ease test as the standard test of readability for its documents and forms.[12] Florida requires that life insurance policies have a Flesch reading ease score of 45 or greater.[13] 
 
 Use of this scale is so ubiquitous that it is bundled with popular word processing programs and services such as KWord, IBM Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Office Word, WordPerfect, and WordPro. 
 
 Polysyllabic words affect this score significantly more than they do the grade level score. 
 
 Flesch–Kincaid grade level [ edit ] 
 
 These readability tests are used extensively in the field of education. The "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula" instead presents a score as a U.S. grade level, making it easier for teachers, parents, librarians, and others to judge the readability level of various books and texts. It can also mean the number of years of education generally required to understand this text, relevant when the formula results in a number greater than 10. The grade level is calculated with the following formula: 
 
 0.39 ( total words total sentences ) + 11.8 ( total syllables total words ) − 15.59 {\displaystyle 0.39\left({\frac {\mbox{total words}}{\mbox{total sentences}}}\right)+11.8\left({\frac {\mbox{total syllables}}{\mbox{total words}}}\right)-15.59} [14] 
 
 The result is a number that corresponds with a U.S. grade level. The sentence, "The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature" is an 11.3 as it has 24 syllables and 13 words. The different weighting factors for words per sentence and syllables per word in each scoring system mean that the two schemes are not directly comparable and cannot be converted. The grade level formula emphasises sentence length over word length. By creating one-word strings with hundreds of random characters, grade levels may be attained that are hundreds of times larger than high school completion in the United States. Due to the formula's construction, the score does not have an upper bound. 
 
 The lowest grade level score in theory is −3.40, but there are few real passages in which every sentence consists of a single one-syllable word. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss comes close, averaging 5.7 words per sentence and 1.02 syllables per word, with a grade level of −1.3. (Most of the 50 used words are monosyllabic; "anywhere", which occurs eight times, is the only exception.) 
 
 Applications [ edit ] 
 
 Leah Borovoi from the Infinity Labs[clarification needed] has calculated the Flesch score for the seven Harry Potter books that were located at the Glozman Website. The average Flesch score for Harry Potter was 72.83, with the highest score (81.32) for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and the lowest score (65.88) for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 
 
 Readability of newspaper content (by topic and by newspaper) has been measured on a big-data scale, showing strong topic-readability correlations[15]. 
 
 Leah Borovoi also calculated the Flesch score for 2000 articles about people on Wikipedia. According to this study, the most readable articles are about sportspeople and entertainers (actors and actresses), while the least readable articles are about scientists and philosophers. The least readable scientists are economists (Flesch score = 41.70), psychologists (42.25), chemists (42.81), and mathematicians (43.35). 
 
 According to the Flesch score, the most readable Wikipedia articles about people are the articles about basketball player Larry Bird (72.60), former Olympic Skater Bonnie Blair (70.43) and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (70.11). 
 
 See also [ edit ] 
 
 References [ edit ] 
 
 Further reading [ edit ] 
 
 Flesch R (1948). "A new readability yardstick". Journal of Applied Psychology . 32 : 221–233. doi:10.1037/h0057532. 
 
 Farr JN, Jenkins JJ, Paterson DG (October 1951). "Simplification of Flesch Reading Ease Formula". Journal of Applied Psychology. 35 (5): 333–337. doi:10.1037/h0062427. 

 AP Photo. Fourth Estate Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader 
 
 Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs. 
 
 The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score. 
 
 Trump’s low grade at the debates wasn’t a fluke. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score. 
 
 Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as “very” and “great,” and the pronouns “we” and “I,” which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them “losers,” “total losers,” “haters,” “dumb,” “idiots,” “morons,” “stupid,” “dummy” and “disgusting.” He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime—except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten. 
 
 It’s obvious that Trump’s verbal deficit, as grating as it may be on the ears of the educated class, has not caused him much political pain. The media has noted the opposite: Trump’s overreliance on sports and war metaphors in his public utterances, his reductionist, one-dimensional policy prescriptions—including nuanced geopolitical arguments such as get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!—inspire trust in many rather than distrust. Trump’s rejection of “convoluted nuance” and “politically correct norms,” mark him as authentic in certain corners and advance his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way. By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak. 
 
 Reading Trump transcripts, you can sometimes sense him downshifting to find a clever word or original expression to make a point. Why shouldn’t he want to rise from Trumpspeak and find an honored place among the articulate? But instead of turning a phrase, he almost always grinds his rhetorical gears in defeat. “OK” and “Excuse me” are two of his regular verbal placeholders that indicate that the words he’d like to speak aren’t available. He also likes to ask himself questions when he’s gathering his wits (“How does that help us?” “Did you know that?” “You know why?”). 
 
 It’s precisely because of his apparent inarticulateness that I give him the benefit in the incident from last week, when he said after the Fox News Channel debate that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” as she pummeled him with questions on stage. He maintains that “wherever” was a placeholder for “nose,” which his tongue failed to locate. Trump is capable of invoking a woman’s menses in a put-down, but I would wager he lacks the felicity to do it in real time. 
 
 There’s more to communication than writing—or speaking—in such a way that boosts your Flesch-Kincaid grade-level scores. Excerpts I chose at random from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn score at the 4th- and 5th-grade levels. Yet Mark Twain manages to communicate the great complexities of 19th century American life, especially on the topics of race and justice. Alas, this observation is irrelevant in any discussion of Trump. Twain possessed a nearly unlimited vocabulary and could compose sentences that flow with more twists and turns than a big river spilling into a delta. Huck Finn was deliberately composed in a simpler voice—the voice namely of a poor, illiterate boy. It’s a voice Twain assumed, not his personal voice. 
 
 Still, don’t interpret Trump’s low scores as a marker of low intelligence. Trump’s professional history indicates a skill at dealing and deceiving, inspiring and selling, and such attributes would likely qualify as a types of intelligence in Howard Gardner’s book. The role Trumpspeak has played in Trump’s surging polls suggests that perhaps too many politicians talk over the public’s head when more should be talking beneath it in the hope of winning elections. 
 
 After all, who says you can’t build a political foundation on Lincoln Logs? 
 
 ****** 
 
 The piece came a couple of decimal points from scoring at the 11th-grade level. Thanks to Oren Tsur, a post-doctoral researcher at Lazer Lab at Northeastern University and at the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at Harvard University. Grade me via email: Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. Subscribe to my email alerts, follow my Twitter feed, and sign up for my RSS feed.
– Is Donald Trump smarter than a fifth grader? Maybe so, but his vocabulary hovers around a third- or fourth-grade reading level. So says Jack Shafer at Politico: Trump "prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs," Shafer writes. According to the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, Trump spoke like a fourth-grader at the August 6 Republican presidential debate, where Ted Cruz talked like a ninth-grader and three others—Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson—hit the eighth-grade mark. Trump's low grade "wasn't a fluke," adds Shafer, as the candidate "earned only a 3rd-grade score" at a Michigan news conference on August 11. How does Trump do it? Well, he relies on "great" and "very" and loves "we" and "I," the latter being what Schafer calls "his favorite word." And Trump loves pummeling political opponents with "idiots," "morons," "dumb," "haters," "losers," "total losers," and other to-the-point words. "In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime—except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong)," writes Shafer. Yet Trump's pared-down vocabulary "has not caused him much political pain," Shafer notes, possibly because "too many politicians talk over the public’s head when more should be talking beneath it in the hope of winning elections." Click for Shafer's full piece.