Palin speaks at higher grade level than Biden?

"When she said it, it sounded good, but on paper it's a completely different animal," said the President of the Global Language Monitor. "It's like, what is that?"

Joe Biden

As for Joe Biden, the firm graded the following sentence at the 15th grade level:

"The middle class under John McCain's tax proposal, 100 million families, middle-class families, households to be precise, they got not a single change; they got not a single break in taxes."

In reviewing that sentence the firm's president seemed to be impressed by Biden's restraint.

"In a typical Joe Biden thing, this sentence would serve as a launching point to even more complex and convoluted statements," he said.

We're smarter than you

So are conservatives jumping on this study saying, "Palin is smarter than Biden?"  Not really.  Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air discounts it as meaningless.

Reading level was and is calculated using a calculation of average numbers for sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, and syllables per word.

This analysis just shows that Palin used a somewhat higher ratio in this calculation than Biden.  That doesn’t necessarily make her a better communicator, not even if people ignore content altogether.

So while this gives Palin supporters a reason to crow about her trouncing Biden’s supposed intellect, it’s really meaningless, especially with the slight gap noted by CNN.  They’re better off reviewing Biden’s gaffes, which is a much more abundant resource.

Past politicians

As a point of reference the firm ranked other politicians in past debates as well and puts Abraham Lincoln at the top of their list speaking at just over an 11th grade level.  Joe Lieberman was next in line at about 10th grade.  While at the bottom of the heap is Ross Perot at a sixth grade level.

President George W. Bush spoke at a 7th grade level in his prior debates while Ronald Reagan came just short of 10th grade with a 9.8 rating.

How'd they figure it?

The firm says they used a modified Flesch-Kincaid formulation for their study.  Oh yeah, that formula.  Although regular readers of The Vote would know instantly what that formula is, for newcomers we'll provide it for you (and of course we didn't Google it.)

0.39 x Average No. of words in sentences + 11.8 x Average No. of syllables per word - 15.59.

Previous

1 | 2