Study: Lawmakers talk like 10th-graders

Members of Congress talk like 10th-graders, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis released Monday.

The quality of speech in the Congressional Record this year has dropped almost a full grade level since 2005, to 10.6 from 11.5, with an even faster decline among more conservative members, according to the study.

{mosads}The analysis is based solely on the use of longer words and sentences and does not analyze clarity. The Flesch-Kincaid metric has been used to measure reading complexity in schools and has also been applied to founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, which was written for someone with a 15th-grader’s comprehension, and the Constitution (a 17th-grader).

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) is identified as the legislator with the simplest speech. He speaks like a sixth-grader, according to the study, while Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) has the most complex speech of any member in the 112th Congress. His speech is the equivalent of a 20th-grader, according to the analysis.

Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), a freshman who has had the second-lowest grade level overall since 1996, told NPR’s Tamara Keith that his mother might be embarrassed, “but I’m glad to know I’m not obfuscating our challenges with words that are too complicated.”

The National Center for Education Statistics found in 1993 that the average American reads between the eighth- and ninth-grade level, but did not rank adults by grade level in the 2002 study.

President Obama’s three State of the Union speeches, delivered to a joint session of Congress, were all ranked at the eighth-grade level.