Here are the ESV’s overall readability statistics:

• Flesch Reading Ease: 74.9
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 7.4

That’s why we say in marketing materials that the ESV reads at an eighth-grade level.

Below are readability statistics for each book in the ESV. Readability is tough to condense to a single number; many factors contribute to how easy or hard something is to read. The Flesch-Kincaid algorithm, for example, doesn’t handle poetry well. That limitation skews the results for poetry-heavy books.

Therefore, you should best consider these figures in relative terms: John (in general) writes simpler Greek than Paul, and the ESV’s translation philosophy lets you see some of that through the lower grade level in John’s gospel and letters.

With the above cautions in mind, here are the Flesch Reading Ease (higher is easier to read) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (lower is easier to read) for each book in the ESV. The highest and lowest numbers in each column are in bold.

We calculated these scores using Microsoft Word. We changed some of the poetry into paragraph form to improve the accuracy of the figures.

James Coleman was kind enough to create five web buttons for your site if you want to show your support for the ESV in that way.

You can copy/paste them below, or you can visit our Web Buttons page for more instructions and other designs.

Thanks a lot, James.

Tim Challies, who frequently writes about the state of the Christian bookselling industry, talks about how to use Scripture in books:

The goal in prooftexting or quoting from the Bible is to accurately represent and interpret God’s Word. We do not use the Bible to prove what we want it to say. Rather, we turn to the Bible to learn from God Himself, and then share what we have learned with others. We must have our priorities straight.

He then goes on to define an “essentially literal” translation.

Formal Equivalence (also known as Word for Word, Literal Translation or Essentially Literal) – Formal equivalence attempts to represent each word of the original language with a corresponding word in the English language. This allows the reader to know, as closely as possible, what God actually spoke through the authors of the Bible. The merit of this method is that it allows intimate access to the originally inspired words for those who do not speak the languages the Bible was written in. The downside is that it is possible for these translations to be awkwardly worded and follow difficult sentence structures. Examples are the New American Standard Bible and the English Standard Version.

Finally, he lists four guidelines that apply just as much to preaching sermons as they do to writing books. Here are two of them. To learn the rest, you’ll have to read his post.

• Use a default translation that is essentially literal
• Use translations that are familiar to readers

Several of Tim’s points (coincidentally) dovetail nicely with our recent video.

Full disclosure: Crossway regularly provides free review copies to Tim for one of his other sites.