What's Wrong With This Picture?

 So, I was typing up a paper and saw this little number in the document stats labeled "Flesch-Kincaid score." I had no idea what the name or the number (which was 68) meant, so I looked it up. Here's what I found:

The numbers and the readability levels make sense. Then I look at the education levels, and I'm like, "What?" 0-29 means confusing, then they say that if you write something very confusing, you're probably very well-educated.

Yeah. Right.

College graduates should be able to write lucidly about the most nebulous subjects. Good writing isn't supposed to be so complex that only a professor can understand it. Good writing should be simple enough that an elementary schooler could understand it. I'm not saying you only use small words; I'm saying you use simple sentence structures, complete context, and clear explanations. I'm saying that no matter what you're writing about, you should make it as easy as possible for the average joe to understand. Because most people in the world are average joes or remember what it was like to be one. Even college professors appreciate good readability. No one likes to wade through ten pages of perfect no-dangling-participles-allowed grammar, with fifty-line paragraphs and fifty-word sentences.

The secret here is concision. (To use elementary school lingo: write shorter.) Use less words. Most people use excess words. There's a careful balance here: don't use excess words, but don't sacrifice meaning, either. Keep it short and sweet.

I appreciate a scale that tells me if my writing is hopelessly opaque. I don't appreciate that some people assume opacity comes with education.

(Fun Fact: my blog posts normally score somewhere in the 60s on this chart. My stories are usually in the 80s.)