The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : SOTU Responses: Reading Ease Follow-Up

The Spectacle Blog

SOTU Responses: Reading Ease Follow-Up

By Matthew Walther on 2.13.13 @ 10:32AM

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!

About the Author

Matthew Walther is the assistant editor of The American Spectator.

http://spectator.org/blog/2013/02/13/sotu-responses-reading-ease-fo

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