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Online pundits and commenters got excited this week after the University of Minnesota's Smart Politics blog pointed out the great range in apparent grade level between the speeches delivered by Ann Romney and Michelle Obama at the Republican and Democratic conventions:

"The First Lady's speech Tuesday was written at a 12th grade level -- the highest in history among the wives of presidential nominees and far above Ann Romney's lowest mark of a 5th grade level."

Smart Politics evaluated the speeches using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a well-known metric first developed for the U.S. military to assess the prose in its technical manuals.

While some of the blogs and politicos were simply content to report the disparity in apparent grade levels between the speeches, Smart Politics' Eric Ostermeier looked at the differences tactically, considered why the nominees' wives and their speechwriters might have crafted the speeches the way they did.

Ann Romney's speech "was extremely focused on the family vis-à-vis past speeches from the wives of nominees," Ostermeier wrote, seeing her emphasis as part of her "attempt to close the gender gap for her husband's campaign."

Michelle Obama's speech "ls actually written at a higher grade level than all but 11 of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union addresses delivered since 1934," Ostermeier writes.

"It bears repeating," Ostermeier cautioned, "that a simplistically written speech does not necessarily mean it is a poor speech, nor that a speech with longer sentences is necessarily superior."

"At best, readability formulas are estimates of conceptual complexity," said Bill Henk, dean of Marquette University's College of Education, whose academic expertise includes literacy, reading and language studies.

Readability measurements like the Flesch-Kincaid consider factors such as the number of unisyllabic words compared to polysyllabic ones, and the number of words per sentence. But, Henk noted in a cautionary tale, you could take a 100-word speech at a given readability level, re-cut it into randomly ordered new sentences, and end up with incomprehensible gibberish with the same readability score.

Differences in reading grade level of speeches or pieces of writing often come down to "the audience you are trying to reach and the purpose you are trying to reach them for," he said.

Public speakers face risks in both directions, Henk said, if they try to sound more intellectual than they really are, or if they dumb down what they're trying to say.

Readability is really another word for the "comprehensibility" of a text, Henk said, noting that comprehension can vary significantly from person to person. "The only way to tell if a text is readable or comprensible is to have someone read it," Henk said. But even then, evaluating comprehension may depend on what you ask the reader to do after reading it.

I'm pretty sure that Rudolf Flesch (1911-'86), a strong advocate for plain speech in public writing, would have considered a 12th-grade level elevated for a broadband speech (though I think Ostermeier and others would counter that Michelle Obama's speech was likely tailored to an audience comfortable with that level of diction).

I'd certainly contend that good writing, excellent writing, even writing that moves people to tears or to action, can be found at a wide variety of Fleisch-Kincaid grade levels.

I ran the Gettysburg Address through an online Flesch-Kincaid calculator: it has a grade level of 11.49. Another of President Lincoln's greatest hits, the Second Inaugural Address, grades even higher, at 12.26.

But the King James translation of the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew checks in at 9.58, as does the final segment of "The Great Gatsby."

Three recent columns by my colleague Jim Stingl average to a grade level of 7.10, not unusual for a newspaper writer, who wants his work to be read by a wide range of people.

Connie Willis' novelette "Fire Watch," which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for excellence in sci-fi/fantasy writing, captures the heroism of volunteers during the blitz of Britain in World War II at a grade level of 5.22, though I'm not sure many fifth-graders would grasp all of its emotional nuances. Mike Resnick's dialogue-heavy "The Homecoming," a Hugo nominee this year, tells the story of a highly-charged father-son reunion, not to a mention a little exobiology, at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 4.35.