This column discusses two studies of appellate-brief writing that reached different conclusions and call for different explanations.
The first study scored nearly every brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court from 1969 to 2004 using four readability-assessment tools, two of which are described here.
The Flesch Reading Ease Scale uses sentence and word length to assess readability and assigns a score: Zero to 30 is “very difficult,” while 90 to 100 is “very easy,” and 60 is “plain English.” The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level reports the number of years of formal education a reader needs in order to understand the text: 12 means a high-school graduate, 16 means a college graduate, and 19 means a law-school graduate.