*College Professor Or Junior High Teacher? *Smart Politics analyzed the
content of Barack Obama's State of the Union speech and found that it
was like something a junior high teacher
<http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2010/01/professor_obama_presidents_sta.php>
would write for his students.
*Obama's Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of 8.8 for his first State
of the Union Address was the fourth lowest score since FDR's first
Address in 1934.*
What this means is that Obama wrote and delivered a speech that
incorporated shorter sentences, with those sentences containing
shorter words, than nearly every such Presidential Address in the
modern era.
(The 8.8 is a grade level score.)
Just in case you didn't make the comparison to Obama's predecessor, they
do.
*Bush averaged a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.4 across his seven State
of the Union Addresses - or nearly two full grades higher than
Obama's speech. Bush's speeches also averaged 2.4 more words per
sentence than Obama, at 19.0.*
In other words, the text of George W. Bush's speeches are expected
to be understandable (in written form) by an average sophomore in
high school, whereas Obama's speech should be understandable by a
junior high school student.
No wonder Obama had his nose up in the air for so much of the speech.
More seriously, the decline in those scores since FDR shows the
influence of television, with its mass audience. In the past, these
speeches were directed to congressmen and journalists; now they are
directed to the voters, and so have to be given at a lower level if they
are to be effective. (I would like to see a return to the older
practice of putting them in writing, rather than having this show once a
year, but I realize that genie will probably never go back in the bottle.)
- 6:01 AM, 1 February 2010 [link]
<http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/February2010_1.html#jrm8340>
http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/February2010_1.html#jrm8340
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