The literary sophistication of the State of the Union has been declining since the founding
But The Economist's language blog puts things in perspective:
However, there's no normative weight to the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. The score is a function of how long the sentences are and how many syllables the words have. It's a weak proxy for accessibility, not substance or value. I just tested a couple of recent articles in The Economist—which I hope we can all agree is a reasonably well-written publication—and found grade levels of 10.3, 10.6, and 10.8. George Orwell's "Why I Write": 9.5. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": 7.4, suggesting that the Fleisch-Kincaid formula isn't that sensitive to context. In any case, such comparisons are a little silly; no one judges political speeches on their syntactic complexity. (Reagan's address to the nation after the Challenger disaster: 5.7.)
