Obama State of the Union Adress registers as 8th grade reading level material

[AFK]

Well, I would say more often than not they are made.  But they can be made by varying forces.  Generational poverty is a biggie where I live and work.  Families where it is pretty much a given that they are not going to go anywhere with their lives.  Of course, people can fight out of that lot if they want to and really apply themselves.  But, it can be pretty challenging for a person if they are surrounded by loved ones who constantly send them messages, explicit and implicit, that there is simply nothing they can do to get ahead in life.  I think it is important that they still have some kind of voice and connection with their government, if they want it. 

So I guess I'm saying I don't think it is inherently a bad thing that the President has to "dumb down" his speeches so more Americans can understand what he's talking about.  But, at the same time, it certainly is something of a reflection upon our populace, and indicative of the need for programs and solutions to help raise literacy levels amongst the poor. 

[trippinprincezz13]

So I guess I'm saying I don't think it is inherently a bad thing that the President has to "dumb down" his speeches so more Americans can understand what he's talking about.  But, at the same time, it certainly is something of a reflection upon our populace, and indicative of the need for programs and solutions to help raise literacy levels amongst the poor.

Agreed. Hell, I was always "ahead of the class" through school, especially in reading/comprehension, and can usually pick up on new concepts pretty easily. However, I'm not well-versed in politics (working on it), economics, etc., so I appreciate when those sort of things are discussed it *simple-enough* terms, to an extent at least, so that I can pick up on what's going on. Wasn't really something that was incorporated into school at all, unless one took an elective covering the basics, so again, probably a product of our society and something that needs to be addressed. So add unfamiliarity with politics to the difficulty in comprehension a lot of people may have, and I can understand keeping speeches to the general public fairly simple.

[Elder Iptuous]

Not being well versed in a particular topic doesn't require that the language be 'dumbed down' by measure of sentence and word length, though.
It is simply a matter of not using jargon and defining terms not likely to have been encountered by the audience.

[trippinprincezz13]

Not being well versed in a particular topic doesn't require that the language be 'dumbed down' by measure of sentence and word length, though.
It is simply a matter of not using jargon and defining terms not likely to have been encountered by the audience.

Yea, that is true - I was thinking "dumbed-down" vocabulary wise, when it's more the sentence/word length that determines grade level (though I'd imagine vocabulary would be a factor to some extent). But yea, I get what you're saying.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Well, I would say more often than not they are made.

Case in point - I'm currently watching Jesus Camp on teevee. Sure I think it's appalling that children are brainwashed like this but, ultimately, they're going to grow up into fully formed retards, utterly immune to any form of logic and common sense and spread this stupidity onto their progeny like intellectual sickle cell. Can I empathise? Hell yeah! Should they be rounded up and sent to death camps? Hell yeah!

[Triple Zero]

hah! I just spent a good chunk of the workday scoring things on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. The "grade level" of writing has nothing to do with content or anything--it's calculated by the average sentence length and the average number of syllables per word. It's fairly rare to see anything written for the public that's over a 6th grade level.

Do you have a tool for that, or do you need to count syllables by yourself?



(90–100 = easily understood by an average 11-year-old student; 60–70 = easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students; 0–30 = best understood by university graduates)

Would a tool help? I bet one must be out there. Counting words and sentences is easy for a computer. Counting syllables is a bit harder, but I bet there's some computational linguistics lib out there that can do it--as the scale is designed specifically for English, a straightforward dictionary-lookup would suffice¹.


¹with German or Dutch, words can theoretically be of arbitrary length by combining them according to certain rules, so extra cleverness is needed. But then, a readability scale in such languages would probably also need to be adapted to take this into account (reading long words that are combinations of others is easier than reading long singular words that just happen to be really long).

Personally, I think it's kind of a weird to use the flesch-kincaid to score oral communication - it's for reading comprehension. People never say "that guy talks at a ninth grade level". I guess it is useful for comparing which speeches have the longest sentences, but I'm not sure that FK-reading comprehension scores are necessarily correlated with speech comprehension.

This. Very good point.

It's complete media-bait bullshit. Especially how they imply that lower grades (meaning better comprehension*) are somehow a bad thing!

(*ASSUMING that you can apply a reading-comprehension scale to oral communication)

"President Obama's three addresses have the lowest grade average of any modern president"

OH NOES!! HE DOESNT USE ENOUGH BIG WORDS

What would be interesting is applying a scale test of how much information he's actually conveying with his speech. Which you can do almost just as well with small words as big words.

Designing such a scale may be harder, but it can be done, especially with today's computational linguistics algorithms. There's already tools that can estimate change of subject in a text, so how many subjects does he cover per 1000 syllables? (a kilosyllable, that is)
A bit harder (at least I don't immediately see how it can be done) would be to also check in how much he just touches on a certain subject with trite soundbites that don't really tell anything, versus whether he actually makes a statement or takes a stance on some topic (because the subject-detection algo might not distinguish between that).

[Golden Applesauce]

Yeah, (afaik) all the major reading level scales are computer automated.  The tricky bit is exactly the syllable count; some of the scales are more popular than they are good simply because they don't use the syllables and thus are easier to apply.  My understanding is the the syllable count is mostly meant as an indirect measure of how obscure vs. well known the word is.

The other awesome thing about these scales is that they care about words per sentence.  When your sentences mostly express a single thought, more words imply a more convoluted thought (or at least one expressed that way) and words/sentence is reasonable.  If the body of text just has a lot of run-on sentences, you get ridiculously high scores.  Feed punctuation-light poems, forum posts, or rambling politician speak into them and they'll spit back grade levels 60+.  The scales weren't designed for that, obviously, but neither were they designed for speech, so I question their use to grade an address all together.

[Golden Applesauce]

Making things easier to understand is not the same as "dumbing it down."  Nobody ever says "Hey, these furniture assembly instructions are as hard to understand as my old college texts - I'm glad they respect my intelligence, rather than catering to the lowest common denominator."

[Golden Applesauce]

Well, I would say more often than not they are made.

Case in point - I'm currently watching Jesus Camp on teevee. Sure I think it's appalling that children are brainwashed like this but, ultimately, they're going to grow up into fully formed retards, utterly immune to any form of logic and common sense and spread this stupidity onto their progeny like intellectual sickle cell. Can I empathise? Hell yeah! Should they be rounded up and sent to death camps? Hell yeah!

So, is Ratatosk "one of the good ones" ?

[Golden Applesauce]

Not being well versed in a particular topic doesn't require that the language be 'dumbed down' by measure of sentence and word length, though.
It is simply a matter of not using jargon and defining terms not likely to have been encountered by the audience.

There's a very real cognitive load associated with parsing longer sentences.  English (or any other natural language) has unbounded lookahead.  That's problematic, because it means that you could potentially need to wait all the way until the end of the sentence to even figure out which part of speech the first word was, which requires keeping the entire sentence in working memory, unparsed, for as long as it takes they guy to finish saying all of the words.

Shorter sentences put a cap on this memory management (mostly; you still need additional context to resolve sentences like "They are hunting dogs."), which means that the listener can spend more brainpower thinking about what is being said, as opposed to merely parsing it.  Given that the speech is televised and there's no way to know or control how many things are competing for the home viewers' attention (cooking, kids running around, whatever) it's common sense to make your speech require as little dedicated cognition as possible.

[Placid Dingo]

On the other side you have leaders like PM Kevin Rudd who always spoke to the public as though everyone was on his level.

He's now Foreign Minister.

[Elder Iptuous]

Not being well versed in a particular topic doesn't require that the language be 'dumbed down' by measure of sentence and word length, though.
It is simply a matter of not using jargon and defining terms not likely to have been encountered by the audience.

There's a very real cognitive load associated with parsing longer sentences.  English (or any other natural language) has unbounded lookahead.  That's problematic, because it means that you could potentially need to wait all the way until the end of the sentence to even figure out which part of speech the first word was, which requires keeping the entire sentence in working memory, unparsed, for as long as it takes they guy to finish saying all of the words.

Shorter sentences put a cap on this memory management (mostly; you still need additional context to resolve sentences like "They are hunting dogs."), which means that the listener can spend more brainpower thinking about what is being said, as opposed to merely parsing it.  Given that the speech is televised and there's no way to know or control how many things are competing for the home viewers' attention (cooking, kids running around, whatever) it's common sense to make your speech require as little dedicated cognition as possible.

was this meant to address the point i was making?

[Cramulus]

Do you have a tool for that, or do you need to count syllables by yourself?

Yep. MS Word has it built in. Tools --> Spelling and Grammar.

and there's tons of websites  you can use to calculate it: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/


incidentally
GA is writing at an 11th grade level
000's last post was at the 14th grade level

[Elder Iptuous]

and the search for the smrtest presidurnt is on!
Archive of presidential speeches:
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches

I'm rooting for you Jefferson!  (1st inaugural speech: grade level 21)

[Triple Zero]

Do you have a tool for that, or do you need to count syllables by yourself?

Yep. MS Word has it built in. Tools --> Spelling and Grammar.

and there's tons of websites  you can use to calculate it: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/


incidentally
GA is writing at an 11th grade level
000's last post was at the 14th grade level

Sweet! That means I can cast GREATER POLYMORPHISM!

wait, how come they're not in college? is 14th grade a good thing? (except for buffing your base attack bonus?)