So triggerman posted that study on "lyrical intelligence" on SCM, and an interesting point was made in the comments: the methodology depends entirely upon the punctuation of the song entered. Including punctuality dramatically lowers scores (to produce results like those in the study)—without punctuation, songs were closer to the eighth grade reading level.
The study also only included songs that topped the country / pop charts for 3+ weeks, meaning Taylor's only inclusions were Our Song, WANEGOD, IKYWT, SIO. Not exactly Her strongest bunch, lyrically speaking.
Someone in SCM's comments also put all of Speak Now's songs into some content analysis site and found that it averaged a 9th grade reading level (unpunctuated)— which is nearly three times as high as Taylor's score reported in the study.
ANYWAYS. This study is kinda bogus crap that doesn't prove anything aside from the fact that songwriters' vocabularies are declining across genres. And this isn't even necessarily a problem when one considers that a goal of songwriting (and human speech in general) is to convey complex things in the simplest ways possible.
Screaming, Crying 
