The state of our union is … dumber

This chart plots the reading level of every State of the Union address. Each bubble represents a single speech, with the height of the bubble indicating grade level, and the bubble's size indicating speech length. They used the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which measures the length of the words and the number of words per sentence, to track the reading level of every SOTU, but this can be misleading because the results only say is that words and/or sentences have been getting shorter and that trend might only denote a stylistic shift in political rhetoric.