Ha! Made you look. Boy, you folks are more interested in this stuff than any other bunch of people that I knew. Only you folks would care. Please post a comment, I’m going to be able to see how many people viewed this thread, I’d sure like to see the names.
What? You want to see how many people got bored during the day? It’s raining and my whistle practice is cancelled.
I used to be a cunning linguist but now I just practice tongue-twisters.
Dammit! Meanie.
I thought it might be the elusive verbal pronoun.
“Whatever” - the syntactic null.
Anyway, I bet half the people who looked at this were wondering what kind of APOD Denny had come up with.
ack! nuther round of get the chicken is it?
Of course I looked. I wondered what a speech equivalent to umami would be like.
If we’re off on the hunt, let’s let Mutepoint tagalog.
Grrr…
Oh that was fun. I guess that’s the last time I’ll be able to pull something like that.
Huh? What?
Yeah. Finality is so limiting. 
And here I thought we were going to be talking about the past habitual tense…
Redwolf
Let’s talk about it anyway. I remember studying all of those tenses in school and actually understanding the subtle differences. When I write a memo or a policy statement, I use one of those obscure tenses to explain a particular point. Then I remember who my audience is and I break that sentence down into very concrete, simple sentences.
I have always wanted to find the elusive 7th-grade-level writing guide. I wish word programs had a check for this. One of the things I would look for in reporting in technical things like science and industry is the ability to so thoroughly understand a subject and their audience that they can accurately break down the jargon and terms to laypersons. Often I see the opposite.
What do you mean by that? 
OK you got me.. 
Well, I looked, but I tend to look at every post in the Pub, except when my internet dies for a few weeks and there’s about 2 new pages of posts when I finally get back.
So, in a way you got me, but in another way, you didn’t.
I’ll take a guess at what Idiot was referring to. I often see 50 or more word sentences, a sentence that is the whole paragraphs sometimes, that have an assortment of thoughts and ideas scattered throughout the sentence. For those of us who read the rule books to see how policy can be manipulated to our advantage, this can be a feast for filing greivances. For those folks who are required to implement policy, this is not so easy to practice. The opposite can also be true and things can be left wide open to interpretation. Until the lawsuits start.
In high school and college it was mentioned that the mean reading level was equivalent to late 7th grade proficiency and that for readability a writer should keep the writing at a 7th grade level to reach the majority of the population. I have as of yet seen what the guidelines are for this readability system. Turns out Word 2007 has a proofing program that checks for this. My score for this paragraph is below.
Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level 9.5
As you can see from the link, the formula is rather basic and doesn’t account for obscure mono syllable words or common multiple syllable words.