When composing articles, journalists have to consider a lot more than just the facts and figures that defend their stories. They have to keep reader grade level – a scale of years of education the reader may have mastered – in mind, too. The number of syllables in words, for example, and the number of words in a sentence.

That’s why many writers use the Flesch-Kincaid reading level test on their articles before submitting them. General news stories are supposed to score in the eighth-to-tenth grade range in order to be sure they can be read by most people, while sports articles can delve down to sixth because of the wider age-range of appeal of that subject. News on financial topics can be 10th-to-college, if only because of the multisyllabic words used in that field. Politics, though, can be kind of a mix, usually falling between seventh and 11th due to varying complexities of its topics.

Somebody needs to tip off most of today’s presidential candidates about this reading level concept, however. The speeches of many of them are scoring low in grade-level readability. And none of them score as low as Donald Trump’s, which dwell in the fourth-grade basement.
According to Flesch-Kincaid analyses recently done by The Boston Globe, Trump’s announcement speech scored in the elementary level of 4.1 school years. That was the lowest of all 19 presidential candidates included in the study.