Democrats far better than Republicans at grammar Chafee supporters make fewest mistakes

Lincoln Chafee supporters had the fewest grammatical errors in comments posted on presidential candidate Facebook pages. Donald Trump supporters had the most. Lincoln Chafee supporters had the fewest grammatical errors in comments posted on presidential candidate Facebook pages. Donald Trump supporters had the most. Photo: Steven Senne, Associated Press Photo: Steven Senne, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Democrats far better than Republicans at grammar 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A new study analyzing the grammar of comments posted on presidential candidate Facebook pages finds that Republicans tend to butcher the English language at twice the rate of Democrats.

The study by the grammar-checking app Grammarly found that GOP supporters made an average of 8.7 mistakes per 100 words compared to 4.2 mistakes for Democratic supporters.

The Dems also had the bigger vocabulary, with 300 unique words used on average compared to 245 for Republicans.

Broken down by candidate, the trend becomes even more pronounced.

The five Democratic candidates — Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley and Hillary Clinton — all scored higher (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina.

Fiorina supporters tied with Clinton backers with 6.3 errors per 100 words. That was the worst mark for Democrats, but best for Republicans.

The prize for worst grammar of all went to Donald Trump supporters with 12.6 mistakes per 100 words.

Here are the number of supporter mistakes per 100 words by candidate:

Lincoln Chaffee, Democrat, 3.1

Jim Webb, Democrat, 3.4

Bernie Sanders, Democrat, 3.7

Martin O'Malley, Democrat, 4.6

Hillary Clinton, Democrat, 6.3

Carly Fiorina, Republican, 6.3

Ben Carson, Republican, 6.6

Lindsey Graham, Republican, 7.2

George Pataki, Republican, 7.2

Ted Cruz, Republican, 7.3

John Kasich, Republican, 7.7

Jeb Bush, Republican, 7.9

Mike Huckabee, Republican, 8.0

Bobby Jindal, Republican, 8.2

Chris Christie, Republican, 8.3

Rand Paul, Republican, 8.4

Marco Rubio, Republican, 8.8

Rick Santorum, Republican, 11.5

Donald Trump, Republican, 12.6

Grammarly explained the methodology of the study:

We began by taking a large sample of Facebook comments containing at least fifteen words from each candidate's official page between April, 2015 and August, 2015. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative. Since the point of the study was to analyze the writing of each candidate's supporters, we considered only obviously positive or neutral comments. Obviously negative or critical comments, as well as ambiguous or borderline negative comments, were disqualified.

We then randomly selected at least 180 of these positive and neutral comments (~6,000 words) to analyze for each candidate. Using Grammarly, we identified the errors in the comments, which were then verified and tallied by a team of live proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.

Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.