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Matt Viser, "For presidential hopefuls, simpler language resonates" (" Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level"), Boston Globe 10.20/2015:

When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, he decried the lack of intelligence of elected officials in characteristically blunt terms.

“How stupid are our leaders?” he said. “How stupid are they?”

But with his own choice of words and his short, simple sentences, Trump’s speech could have been comprehended by a fourth-grader. Yes, a fourth-grader.

The Globe reviewed the language used by 19 presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, in speeches announcing their campaigns for the 2016 presidential election. The review, using a common algorithm called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test that crunches word choice and sentence structure and spits out grade-level rankings, produced some striking results.

The Republican candidates — like Trump — who are speaking at a level easily understood by people at the lower end of the education spectrum are outperforming their highfalutin opponents in the polls.

How stupid are our journalists?

Over and over again, they dress up plausible insights, like "Simpler language succeeds in politics", with credulous references to an outdated and simple-minded metric that pretends to predict reading level based only on average word and sentence length.

For some details, see "Another dumb Flesch-Kincaid exercise", 10/26/2014, which observes that this passage scores at the 3.9 grade level:

Uva haq jvrqre syvrtra Csrvyr;

Nzbef yrvpugr Csrvyr syvrtra

Iba qrz fpuynaxra tbyqra Obtra,

Zäqpura, frvq vue avpug trgebssra?

Rf vfg Tyüpx! Rf vfg ahe Tyüpx.

Jnehz syvrtg re fb va Rvyr?

Wrar qbeg jvyy re orfvrtra;

Fpuba vfg re ibeorv trsybtra;

Fbetybf oyrvog qre Ohfra bssra;

Trorg npug! Re xbzzg mheüpx!

And this most recent application (to the "speeches announcing [the candidates'] campaigns for the 2016 presidential election") is especially dumb, because some of these speeches were written texts, while others are transcripts of presentations ad libbed on the spot. Spoken language is generally less formal than written language, and will tend to have shorter words. Sentence length — in either case — depends a lot on punctuation choices. And in transcripts of extemporized remarks, the punctuation choices are not even those of the author of the remarks.

Here are three differently-punctuated paragraphs from Trump's announcement, brought up from the comments:

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America. And it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 4.4]

It’s coming from more than Mexico, it’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know, because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 8.5]

It’s coming from more than Mexico, it’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East; but we don’t know, because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 12.5]

It's uncharitable and unfair of me to imply that the author of the Globe piece might be "stupid". But at some point, journalists should look behind the label to see what a metric like "the Flesch-Kincaid score" really is, and ask themselves whether invoking it is adding anything to their analysis except for a false facade of scientism.

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