Recently the State of the Union speeches were ( once again ) scrutinized due to their low "reading levels". In an awesome looking figure, The Guardian succinctly demonstrated that the grade levels of these annual addresses were steadily declining over the past century. In simpler terms: the speeches appeared to be getting "dumber". This may be historically due in part to changing American dialects, as well as an evolving style of public speaking. Perhaps "reading level" tests don't always map well to spoken word, and they certainly don't capture the rhythmic or rhetorical value of oration.

cant (noun) | kant | - from Latin cantō: Jargon of a particular class or subgroup.





Flesch-Kincaid reading level score for: TOS (yellow), TAS (orange), TNG (blue), DS9 (red), and VOY (green).

Higher grade levels imply more difficulty in readability.





So my hypothesis is then: in the case of Star Trek, and maybe sci-fi as a whole, the so-called reading grade level score is driven by the amount of technobabble in a script. In this scenario, we could explain the three observed trends by the nature of the stories being told. For example, consider just Deep Space Nine's slow reading level decay:





The take away result: people don't seem to care much. In other words, higher readability scores don't necessarily translate to more enjoyability. This finally brings me to the title for this article: The Wrath of Cant. Jargon will elevate your reading score, but you still have to tell a good story!