One in Five Adults Can’t Read What We Post

The Hard Road of Words

Text posting is a hard road today. I have known it for a while. Now I can show you why.
The basics in life skills have dropped. Not opinion. Measured. The federal government runs a test on working-age adults called PIAAC. It checks whether a grown person can read, work with numbers, and solve everyday problems. The latest round came back, and the news is plain and hard.
About one in five American adults now reads at or below the lowest level. Roughly 22 percent. That is more than 26 million grown people.
Let me tell you what that level means in real life. A person there can read a stop sign. A soup label. A short, simple sentence. But hand them a lease, a medicine insert, a ballot measure, or a set of instructions with more than one step — and the words close up on them like a door.
Now here is the part that ought to stop you cold. It is getting worse.
From 2017 to 2023, the average reading score of American adults fell twelve points. The share of adults at the bottom level rose nine points. The testing people say it is the first significant drop since they started measuring in 2012.
And there is a twist in the numbers that says something about where we are headed. Our older adults — my generation — score above the international average. Our younger adults score below it. The generation coming up reads worse than the one heading out. That is the wrong direction for a country to be pointed.
The pipeline confirms it. Only about three in ten fourth graders read at grade level right now. Those children become the adults in the next round of testing. The road does not fix itself.
So what does this have to do with a man in Kentucky writing about AI governance every day? Everything. This is the full circle.
I write about the most powerful technology of our lifetime. Rules for how a machine should treat a human being. Contracts between people and the systems they use. Heavy subject matter by any measure.
And from the first day, I set one rule above the style of it all: write plain. Tenth-grade level. Short sentences. One idea per paragraph. No jargon. No showing off.
Some folks in the AI world write to impress each other. Papers stacked with terms only the writers understand. They are talking in a locked room, and the people who most need the conversation are standing outside it.
I made the other choice. The Faust Baseline is written so a working man on a lunch break can read it on his phone and follow every line. Not because the ideas are small. Because the door should be open.
Here is what the federal numbers just told me: that choice was not a style preference. It was the whole ballgame.
If one in five adults cannot get through complex text, then every rule about AI written in complex text has already left a fifth of the country behind. The people most likely to be affected by these systems — and least likely to be asked about them — cannot even read the terms.
That is not their failure. That is the writer’s failure. Plain writing is not dumbing down. Plain writing is respect. It says: you belong in this conversation, and I built the sentence so you could enter it.
And think about what this means for AI itself. Millions of people are being handed powerful tools wrapped in instructions they cannot read. Terms of service nobody gets through. Safety notices written like law school exams. We built the most complicated technology in history and then explained it in the one language a fifth of the country cannot open.
That gap is where trouble lives. A person who cannot read the rules cannot hold anyone to them. A contract only protects the people who can read it.
A builder learns this early. You do not brag about a staircase nobody can climb. You cut the risers to fit the people using them.
Now, I promised you I do not deal in gloom on this site, and I will not start today. Because the fix here is old, known, and free.
Read to a child tonight. Ten minutes. Read something yourself that stretches you a little. And if you write — anything, anywhere — write so the door stays open. Short sentences. One idea at a time. The reader’s dignity ahead of your vocabulary.
The machines are learning to write better every month. The question was never whether AI could handle the words. The question is whether we keep our own grip on them.
Twenty-two percent of the country is standing outside the locked room. Every plain sentence is a key.
I will keep cutting keys. It is a hard road, but it is the right one, and I know where it goes.

Now you know how we got where we are today and what needs to be done.

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