Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
With his own choice of words and his short, simple sentences, Trump’s speech could be comprehended by a fourth-grader. Yes, a fourth-grader.
The Boston Globe reviewed the language used by presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, in speeches. The review, using a common algorithm called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test that crunches word choice and sentence structure and spits out grade-level rankings, produced some striking results.
Republican candidates — like Trump — who are speaking at a level easily understood by people at the lower end of the education spectrum are outperforming their highfalutin opponents in the polls.
By every criteria in the algorithm, Trump is speaking at the lowest level. He uses fewer characters per word in his speech, fewer syllables per word, and his sentences are shorter than all other candidates.
“Trump is talking about things that are emotional, simple, and angry,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican consultant. “It’s, ‘Let’s take their oil!’ It’s Trump. It’s simple.”
President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796 was written at graduate-degree levels, while President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in 1863 was at an 11th-grade level.
A 2012 review of nearly every statement on the House and Senate floors found that the grade level of speeches from members of Congress had declined, from 11.3 in 1996 to 10.6 in 2012. That review used the same algorithm.
It’s not necessarily translatable to what makes a great speech,” said Eric Ostermeier, a University of Minnesota professor who has used the scores to test various candidates and presidents since 2009. “I haven’t seen a fourth-grade one before,” he said of Trump.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2015/10/20/donald-trump-and-ben-carson-speak-grade-school-level-that-today-voters-can-quickly-grasp/LUCBY6uwQAxiLvvXbVTSUN/story.html
