Thursday, January 27, 2011

If Obama is so smart, why does he deliver 8th grade level SOTU speeches?


There are two possible answers to this question. Either Obama isn't that smart or he thinks we are uneducated idiots. You decide.

Via University of Minnesota:
The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores.
But Tuesday evening’s address beat even that.

A Smart Politics analysis of 69 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama’s speech to have notched the second lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test recorded by a U.S. President.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um, maybe BOTH.

Anonymous said...

Clearly the latter. Obama is a lawyer and they are trained to know their audience.