Posted by
Defend America on Sunday, January 31, 2010 12:01:53 PM
'Professor' Obama? President's State of the Union Address Notches 4th Lowest Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score Since FDR
Text
of Obama's Address has a readability score for an average 8th grader -
two grades lower than George W. Bush's Addresses and the historical
average for modern presidents
Barack Obama's ability as a public speaker since his 2008 presidential
campaign has been alternately viewed, often depending on whether or not
one is an Obama supporter, along various dyads: being inspirational
versus being aloof, intellectualizing versus lecturing etc.
However, a Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral
State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of
Obama's speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on
the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President.
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.
...
Obama's Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of 8.8 for his
first State of the Union Address was the fourth lowest score since
FDR's first Address in 1934.
What this means is that Obama wrote and delivered a speech that
incorporated shorter sentences, with those sentences containing shorter
words, than nearly every such Presidential Address in the modern era.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2010/01/professor_obama_presidents_sta.php