Legal Commentary

: Althouse

At the last debate, Obama spoke at the 9th grade level and McCain spoke at the 7th grade level.

To make those word clouds of Obama and McCain's speech at the last debate, I had to edit the transcript to produce a separate text for each man's words. As you can see in the previous post, I was testing my own writing with Flesch Reading Ease Score calculator. This gave me the idea to compare McCain and Obama, for what it's worth.

Obama's speech came out at the 8.74 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, with a Flesch Reading Ease Level of 66.88 (higher is easier, and 60-69 is considered "Standard"). McCain's speech came out at the 7.02 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, with a Flesch Reading Ease Level of 70.63 (70-79 is
"Fairly Easy").

Now, of course, speaking is different from writing. You edit writing, and you get to think about whether you want to be expansive and sesquipedalian or whether you want to adhere to Strunk & White rules like "Omit needless words" and "Avoid fancy words." Speaking is harder to control. You may find yourself babbling or losing your place and wondering how am I ever going to bring this sentence in for a landing, and you don't get to go back and break it up into separate sentences and cut the filler. So the seemingly higher level of speech that tests at a higher level does not necessarily represent higher brain power. Nor can we say that the man speaking at the lower level has a lower capacity for complex thoughts. He may be applying a fine intelligence to composing his sentences well.

So, as I said... for what it's worth.

Now, I remember that CNN reported the testing of the VP debate transcript:

Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)...

Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7... versus 62.4 for Palin.

ADDED: Voir Dire has a table comparing Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin... and Kennedy and Nixon. I think it shows that candidates today are more attuned to communication and soundbites and less to displaying intelligence.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).