How plain is your English?

The business English people are taught uses rarer words than a US president uses in his speeches. Both are measured below. Add yours.

Write or paste something you would really send at work

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What was measured

The business English people are taught
24 lines of the phrasebook kind — “please find attached”, “kindly revert” 69.8%
A US president's campaign speeches
40 public transcripts, 115,341 words, 13,153 sentences 89.0%
The plain answers this site teaches
96 lines, 712 words, 7.4 words per sentence 100%

The point is not that one is good and one is bad. It is that the version that sounds educated is the one almost nobody can follow — and the person with the largest audience in the world does not talk that way.

Where the words come from

Every word is ranked against the New General Service List — 2,809 words that cover most of everyday English. “In the common 1,000” means the first thousand of them. Names, places and numbers are not counted either way.