Welcome to 27th grade

You may well be wondering whether the scratch-made focus is attributed to the chef's success or the other way around, but belay that for a moment while we ponder one of those recurring myths: some notional grade-school level to which news is mythically written.

Short answer: I wish (and so does your IRB, if it's doing its job with those consent documents). The reading complexity of the stuff we present to perfectly innocent audiences tends to rely more on the perceived importance of the writer and the topic (sports team ownership, for example). Thus, let's look instead at the politics story next to the focus-ish success:

Among the most intriguing elections in Michigan this fall is a test of just how far a once reliably Democratic-leaning region around Flint, Bay City and Saginaw has shifted toward Republicans under the populism of former President Donald Trump.

Most political handicappers — the Cook Political Report in Washington and Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics among them — have the race between first-term state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, and Republican Paul Junge, who is making his third attempt at winning a seat in Congress in six years, as a toss-up.

Good so far? Take a deep breath:

That may undervalue somewhat the advantages McDonald Rivet and the Democrats could have, including the institutional support and popularity of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the region, a slight Democratic lean that remains in the boundaries of Michigan's 8th Congressional District and the expected enthusiasm in Flint and Saginaw, two cities with large Black populations, for the presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to become a major party's nominee.

Junge and the Republicans, on the other hand, are counting on some advantages of their own, namely that Harris remains something of an unknown quantity in a region where voters are still predominantly white and working class. Trump came within about 2 percentage points of winning within this district's boundaries four years ago (and within about a point in 2016) on a populist message that Democrats haven't delivered on promises to help voters in a district where county populations have dropped by 10% over the last decade or so.

Also, this year's issue set — inflation and concerns over illegal immigration — is expected to play well in an old industrial region that has seen jobs move out over the decades, even though neither the current administration nor Trump's can claim to have seen any notable gains in the labor force in Bay, Genesee, Midland and Saginaw counties, which make up most of the district. They have mostly continued to see declines, if anything. More recent state and federal investments in solar technology and semiconductor manufacturing are still too recent to have had much of a noticeable economic impact.

And exhale. For all five grafs, our Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level is 22.5; for the fourth and fifth, it's 26.9 -- sort of like finishing your undergraduaet degree, doing a master's and a PhD at a pretty good clip, adding an MD and getting halfway through law school. (Because you've earned it by now, enjoy the suggestion from Microsoft Editor at right.)

Granted, that would be assigning the scale a validity that's -- at the least -- open to question. But whether your target audience is the sports fan with a limited amount of Sunday to spare or the anxiety patient who's deciding whether it's in their interest to participate in your experiment, the scale's reliability makes it a handy guide for when to throw the flag. Let's try repacking a few of those embedded clauses and see if we can get the thing to fit under the seat in front of us. To borrow a phrase that the IR scholar Alexander Wendt recalls from an unkind article review way back when: "There is nothing so profound here that it cannot be said in ordinary language."

That, I think, suggests a larger problem: Do we have something to say here, or are we applying adjectives to the conventional wisdom until it starts to look profound? Dissecting one of the comprehensible bits out of the fourth graf ("this year's issue set — inflation and concerns over illegal immigration"), I'm going with the latter. Whom have we surveyed (and when) to determine "this year's issue set," and how did we determine issue salience in the four counties mentioned? 

From recent polling, this looks like an adequate off-the-top-of-the-head summary of issue salience for current Republican voters -- but if that's as far as the paper looks for issues, it should say so. How, for example, are we teasing inflation out from concerns about "the economy" in general, let alone tell whether an issue is seen positively or negatively? (This is, after all, a reporter who proclaimed in 2023 that inflation "has still been at record levels for some time," though by then it had fallen substantially from a peak that had never approached a "record.") Not to overlook the elephant in the consulting room, but where is abortion on the issue list? Health care in general? Election security? Lurid fictions -- see under "illegal immigration" -- about perfectly legal migrants eating the natives' pets?

There's no substitute for being clear. When in doubt, imagine saying it to your busy, smart friend from the chemistry department. But start by having something to be clear about.