Wicked smaht supa genius!
Via University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics:
Although praised by many for the tone he struck in delivering his 2011 State of the Union address, many conservatives criticized Barack Obama’s speech for being high on rhetoric and short on substance.
As it turns out, Obama’s speech was historically short — both in sentence structure and the words he used.
Last year, Smart Politics calculated that Obama’s debut State of the Union Address tallied one of the lowest Flesch-Kincaid scores in modern political history, by constructing his speech with sentences that were approximately 20 percent shorter in length than the nearly 70 oral addresses given since Franklin Roosevelt.
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.
Obama’s speech had a Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of just 8.1 — which is a half a grade lower than the 8.8 he tallied in 2010.
Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 69 State of the Union Addresses that were delivered orally by presidents before a Joint Session of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt.
Excluded from analysis were five written addresses (by Truman in 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower in 1961, Nixon in 1973, and Carter in 1981) and two addresses that were delivered orally, but not by the President himself (Roosevelt in 1945, Eisenhower in 1956).
Prior to FDR, the vast majority of State of the Union speeches were delivered in writing.
President Obama now has the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score for State of the Union addresses of any modern president — with his 8.5 grade level falling just below the 8.6 score recorded by George H.W. Bush during his presidency.
By contrast — the speeches delivered by two of the most popular presidents in Republican circles in recent generations — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — recorded average scores of 10.3 and 10.4 respectively — nearly two full grade levels higher than Obama.
Kennedy (12.0) and Eisenhower (11.9) delivered speeches that had a reading difficulty of three and a half grade levels higher than Obama.
