The drumbeat has been constant since the day BarackObama first burst upon the national scene: This guy is smarter than the rest of us. He operates on a completely different intellectual plane than mere mortals. He’s brilliant, you’re not.
So how do Obamabots explain the fact that his State of the Union was written at eighth grade level. In fact, it only one State of the Union address in the last seventy-five years was written at a lower level.
University of Minnesota Smart Politics explains:
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.
A little advice, Mr President:
No reason to dumb it down. Alan Grayson isn’t in Congress anymore.
UPDATE: Just to do a reality check, we performed the same analysis on a
couple other pieces of writing.
Paul Ryan¹s response to the SOTU was written at the 10.08 grade level.
Michele Bachmann¹s Tea Party response was written at the 9.00 grade level.
The University of Minnesota¹s explanation (excerpted in this article) was written at the 9.24 grade level.
IHateTheMedia.com¹s portion of this story was written at an 8.12 grade level.
Of course, no one ever called us the Smartest Blog In History.
Source: University of Minnesota
