It seems all those whereases and therefores have gone to their heads, or at least to their prose.

Folks in Congress use too many words and too many syllables, a new study says, for the average American to decode.

The Sunlight Foundation took speeches and statements from the Congressional Record and plugged them into something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability index.

That analysis assigns a grade level for the remarks: The bigger the words and the longer the sentences, the more schooling you need to decipher them.

Most Americans read at the eighth- or ninth-grade level, the study says, but Congress speaks in language geared for a high school underclassman (albeit with logic that sometimes seems straight from kindergarten).

The smarty pants in our local delegations? Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri's 6th District. You need to be a college freshman, the test suggests, to fully understand what it is the Missouri Republican is talking about.

By contrast, Missouri GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler's prose fits somewhere between the eighth and ninth grades.

High school freshman should get Sen. Claire McCaskill, while you need to be a high school sophomore to decode Sen. Roy Blunt. Juniors should be able to track Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and Kevin Yoder or Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran.

You'd need to be at least as sharp as a high school senior to comprehend Rep. Lynn Jenkins.

Just because Hartzler's language is middle school simple, though, doesn't mean there isn't Ph.D. reasoning behind it.

"What some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress," study author Lee Drutman noted, "others will see as more effective communications."

Hartzler's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The overall congressional score was a high school sophomore-friendly 10.6, down almost a full grade level from 2005. Rep. Todd Akin came in the simplest of any Kansan or Missourian -- 8.14.

"Those on the political extremes, especially those on the far right, tend to have the most simple speech patterns," Drutman wrote.

Most newspaper stories rank between 11th grade and college sophomore, the study noted, except of course when they read like they were written by someone, uh, simpler.

While Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union speech rang up an 8.4, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech rolled a righteous 9.4. Those younger than high school juniors were likely befuddled by the Gettysburg Address -- four score and all that.