How much does your writing weigh?

Microsoft Word and some other programs have a useful feature that will take your writing and tell you its Flesch-Kincaid reading level. At least, this information is useful if you have some idea what it is. Briefly, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula is supposed to take a bunch of writing tell you about how many years of education you would need to make sense of it. It goes like this:

0.39 (number of words/number of sentences) + 11.8 (number of syllables/number of words) - 15.59

Before I get to my point, let me talk about cars. Since I know hardly anything about cars, I can promise this won't take long.

Some cars are much heavier than others. Now, engineers generally try to make their cars as light as possible so they can go faster, so one reason a car might weigh more than another car is that it's not as good as the lighter car--the engineer made bad choices, the factory used lousy materials, and such. But a lot of very well-made, very fast cars also weigh a lot. Why? Because they have powerful engines, and more powerful engines are heavier. But even in a car with a powerful engine, the engineers will want to keep the weight of the rest of the vehicle down.

Back to writing. What I've discovered is that the idea you're trying to get across is like your writing's engine. Reading level makes a good, rough indicator of your writing's weight. Sometimes big ideas take big words to get across, and complex ideas take complex sentences. There's not necessarily any shame in a higher reading level. But make sure it's because of what your writing has under the hood, and not because you filled the backseat with scrap metal.

Here's a passage, for example, that weighs in at a 12.7 grade level. That means, in theory, that if you haven't graduated high school you probably won't be able to follow it:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. (Blaise Pascal)

In this case Pascal had a few things to say. Every clause adds something to the sentence in (more or less) as few words as necessary. A modern writer might throw the reader a bone and break the sentences up more, but a 12.7 grade level is forgivable.

Now, on the other hand, take something I wrote to see if I could:

I assert that it was my own personal experience and is now my very highly confident and very considered opinion that the phenomenon was, overall, very highly negative and undesirable in all or at least the substantial majority of its effects, consequences, aesthetic qualities, moral components, and/or the subjective emotional feelings which it directly or indirectly brought about and/or produced in myself and/or in others who shared the same or similar or related experience of events which had related and/or directly or indirectly comparable characteristics.

According to Word, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of that sentence is 41.3.* And let us be clear: it does not actually take 17.3 years of post-doctoral education to decipher this monstrosity. It certainly didn't take that for me to write it. I would argue that to have one's eyes glaze over is to truly comprehend the passage. It is a mockery of a sentence, not (simply) because of its length, but because it is a paraphrase of the sentence: "I thought it was bad."

Writing clearly is harder than writing obtusely. Writing clearly is also better than writing obtusely--there isn't much I'm more sure of than that when it comes to writing. Yet at some point (high school? college?) we seem to learn to "up-write" and use weighty writing to create the illusion of weighty ideas. If we're lucky, we learn to un-learn that lesson before we waste too much effort before it becomes an intractable habit.

* I started out aiming as high as I could go, thinking I might hit the high teens. On seeing that I had in fact hit the mid thirties, I thought I would try to get as high as 40. I overshot, and wondered if I could perhaps squeeze out 50 without adding anything of value. I'm sure I could, too, if I wanted to spend another half hour at it, but really it's better to call it off here.