Study: Obama’s State of the Union written at 8th grade level

University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog studied 70 State of the Union addresses since 1934 and found that Obama has three of the six lowest-scoring speeches.

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According to the Flesch-Kincaid test, which measures the readability of written text, the answer is “yup!”

University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog studied 70 State of the Union addresses since 1934 and found that Obama has three of the six lowest-scoring speeches. Tuesday’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is our most verbose president, with his speeches coming in at 30.3 words per sentence in 1934—a 12th-grade reading level.

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