Shane Raynor, who blogs from a Methodist perspective, reviews several Bible translations in a recent entry. Of the ESV, he says:

There are several things I like about the ESV:
(1) It uses readable, modern English, yet still sounds dignified.
(2) Because of its RSV roots, people who have memorized scripture in the King James or RSV will be very comfortable with the ESV.
(3) Crossway, the ESV copyright holder, has been less strict on copyrights and distribution than most other publishers….
(4) I own a classic reference edition, and it has the best font and “feel” of any Bible I own.

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.