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The Spectacle Blog
Inspired by the Guardian’s Flesch-Kincaid analysis of previous State of the Union addresses, to which Kyle helpfully linked last night, I’ve just used Microsoft Word to analyze Marco Rubio and Rand Paul’s responses to the president’s remarks.
Both men’s speeches clocked in at 8.2., beneath both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and much, much lower than, say, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, or Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
Thank you, universal suffrage and public education!
View all comments (3) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Matthew Walther
http://spectator.org/blog/2013/02/13/sotu-responses-reading-ease-fo
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Mike G| 2.13.13 @ 12:22PM
Mr Walther,
You don't explain what the "8.2" number represents. If it represents the reading level of the speeches, it's way too high. Having taught high school English for several years, I can tell you that the average reading level of my 11th grade classes was around the 4th or 5th grade. In the so -called "advanced" classes, the reading level ran around the 7th or 8th grade level. That means that unless most of the public school educated voters of this country were in advanced classes, they didn't understand what Rubio or Paul were saying.
C. Vernon Crisler | 2.13.13 @ 12:30PM
Flesch developed his index as a measure of readability, not of knowledge or intelligence. Those texts that score badly for Flesch are the ones that are written with complex sentence structure or circumlocution (like legal documents).
I suspect the grade-level index is also measuring much the same thing, not knowledge or intelligence or true grade level.
Occam's Tool| 2.13.13 @ 5:39PM
"The Marching Morons" elected Obama.