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I've never needed to conduct assessments for fourth graders. That said, I think I and most any other listener could have predicted this outcome.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/0 ... /23328849/

There's a nice bar graph embedded in the article that demonstrates his standing in comparison to the last 15 presidents. Take a look at it. Essentially DT has the worst (most simplistic vocabulary) of any other contemporary President. We can see and hear this for ourselves, when he repeatedly describes people or buildings "special" or "very, very special". We hear it when he uses the phrase "not good" or "the greatest". I'm sure you all hear this and note it whenever you hear him speak unscripted. His word selection is elementary level.

Here's the beginning of the article.

Donald Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, the lowest of last 15 U.S. presidents, according to analysis

President Donald Trump connects with the American people by using a language that even a fourth grader could understand, according to a recently published analysis by Factbase on the speech patterns of the last 15 U.S. presidents.

The analysis looked at the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office and ranked each of the presidents' speech -- going back to Herbert Hoover -- using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and several other tests that commonly analyze English-language difficulty levels.

His language usage doesn't exactly show him to be like, very, very smart nor does he have the best words.

I think there's a lot of problems with this analysis. First, it looked at presidential speeches in its data set, which are frequently written by other people. It's hard to analyze the grade-level of presidential speaking using other people's words. Second, it didn't just look at speeches. It also looked at things like Trump's tweets. So you are getting a cross-format comparison where the expected rhetorical style is different. Third, the well-known measure of "grade level" it uses is a measure of sentence complexity and number of syllables in words. I know people sometimes use this as a marker of sophistication, but sophisticated writing or speaking isn't necessarily demonstrated by this.

All this together gets you goofy results like Ronald Reagan, a person who at least was in pre-dementia cognitive decline for much of presidency scoring higher than George H.W. Bush, a fairly literate person who was pilloried for his tin-ear for dumbing down his improvisational speech.

First, it looked at presidential speeches in its data set, which are frequently written by other people. It's hard to analyze the grade-level of presidential speaking using other people's words since the words come from a battery of writers.

On top of this, Trump often goes off script. It's often easy to tell when he does this because he'll be reading a speech from a script like he's taking an eye test, then interject very Trumpy asides where you can feel the IQ being sucked out of the room. This is being compared against people who just read their speeches. Obama, by contrast, stuck to speeches more tightly, but he also wrote original content for his speeches to a much greater extent than many presidents. Then you have a president like Clinton who would add is own improvisational flourishes frequently, but he's such a gifted extemporaneous speaker he could make it sound seamless.

The comparison seems hopeless here if we are trying to say anything about the person. If we instead just want to say something about the preferred communication style of the an entire administration, we run into the problem that they are comparing different presidents across entirely different media formats requiring different levels of formality.

EA here is the thing. Can the listener hear that the President speaks at an elementary age level when he speaks unscripted?

Jersey Girl wrote:EA here is the thing. Can the listener hear that the President speaks at an elementary age level when he speaks unscripted?

Trump speaks like a BSing idiot who may have dementia. He relies heavily on a repeating simple words and phrases, extreme hyperbole, and superficial commentary that doesn't require actual knowledge. What I'm saying is this analysis does little to establish anything about the sophistication of presidential speaking.

I'm not even sure if it's all that helpful in telling us the differences between someone who has Peggy Noonan or David Frum write their words for them.

EAllusion wrote:

Jersey Girl wrote:EA here is the thing. Can the listener hear that the President speaks at an elementary age level when he speaks unscripted?

Trump speaks like a BSing idiot who may have dementia. He relies heavily on a repeating simple words and phrases, extreme hyperbole, and superficial commentary that doesn't require actual knowledge. What I'm saying is this analysis does little to establish anything about the sophistication of presidential speaking.

I'm not even sure if it's all that helpful in telling us the differences between someone who has Peggy Noonan or David Frum write their words for them.

Here's another question. When you read a question can you determine if a simple yes or no answer will suffice? ;-)

EAllusion wrote:He relies heavily on a repeating simple words and phrases, extreme hyperbole, and superficial commentary that doesn't require actual knowledge.

Jersey Girl previously:

We can see and hear this for ourselves, when he repeatedly describes people or buildings "special" or "very, very special". We hear it when he uses the phrase "not good" or "the greatest".

Yeah, I know. ;-)

ea wrote:On top of this, Trump often goes off script. It's often easy to tell when he does this because he'll be reading a speech from a script like he's taking an eye test, then interject very Trumpy asides where you can feel the IQ being sucked out of the room. This is being compared against people who just read their speeches. Obama, by contrast, stuck to speeches more tightly, but he also wrote original content for his speeches to a much greater extent than many presidents. Then you have a president like Clinton who would add is own improvisational flourishes frequently, but he's such a gifted extemporaneous speaker he could make it sound seamless.

I take your point about causality, EA, but honestly, you are really just making Jersey Girl's point with this.

Lemmie wrote:

ea wrote:On top of this, Trump often goes off script. It's often easy to tell when he does this because he'll be reading a speech from a script like he's taking an eye test, then interject very Trumpy asides where you can feel the IQ being sucked out of the room. This is being compared against people who just read their speeches. Obama, by contrast, stuck to speeches more tightly, but he also wrote original content for his speeches to a much greater extent than many presidents. Then you have a president like Clinton who would add is own improvisational flourishes frequently, but he's such a gifted extemporaneous speaker he could make it sound seamless.

I take your point about causality, EA, but honestly, you are really just making Jersey Girl's point with this.

I think my point is, "Yeah, Trump talks like an idiot, but this analysis isn't helpful." I interpreted Jersey Girl's point as, "Check out this analysis that reaffirms Trump talks like a child."

I think your point, as always, is, "You said something and I'm going to take this as an opportunity to overcompensate for my life choices."

- Doc