Trump Speaks at Fourth Grade Level

[queentonic]

Trump Speaks At Fourth-Grade Level, Lowest Of Last 15 U.S. Presidents, New Analysis Finds
Nina Burleigh
Newsweek•January 8, 2018

President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

President Donald Trump has the worst vocabulary of any modern president, a new analysis found.

The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-speaks-fourth-grade-level-174127901.html

[gabeana]

1. That is higher

than I thought, honestly

[Kirk Lover]

2. That's why the deplorables love him so...he speaks a language they understand. n/t

[Ohiogal]

3. That's the only way

his followers can understand him, since they aren't exactly highly educated themselves.

[tblue37]

4. I just checked the scores on some of my own online articles. I scored "very difficult to read"

and "college level or above" on all their tests.

But my online articles are very popular, specifically because people find them so readable. For example, I have over 14 million readers worldwide for my grammar and usage website, and my readers tell me that they love my site because I make grammar comprehensible even when they lack any prior familiarity with grammatical concepts and relevant terminology.

I deliberately avoid using a pedantic, "fancy-pants" style because I want my readers to understand my explanations, just as I want my students to understand what I explain in class.

In other words, my style is not "very difficult to read" at all, except in the sense that the baseline for readability has gotten so low that what a fourth grade student could handle in 1959 when I was in fourth grade is now considered to be "college level or above"!

Trump's speech is, in my opinion, far below a true fourth grade level, although it might well be the level our schools now consider to be appropriate for fourth graders.

And that really disturbs me.

[gabeana]

5. I'd love a link to your

writings

[tblue37]

8. Here is the article index to my grammar & usage site:

http://grammartips.homestead.com/articleindex.html

My essay-writing site (Essay, I Say):
http://essayisay.homestead.com/index.html

My parenting site (Who's Minding the Children?):
http://childrensneeds.homestead.com/index.html

My deaf/hard of hearing site (I'm Listening as Hard as I Can!):
http://deafnotdumb.homestead.com/index.html

My ADD/ADHD site (A Flea Hopping Through the Pages of an Encyclopedia):
http://hyperfast.homestead.com/index.html

My poetry site:
http://tinablue.homestead.com/index.html

My teaching/education site (Teacher, Teacher):
http://teacherblue.homestead.com/index.html

My websites where I post humorous, true animal and kid anecdotes
Pet Tales
http://pettales.homestead.com/index.html

Kidbits
http://kidbits.homestead.com/index.html

And Out of the Blue, which is the site where I post "orphan" articles--i.e., ones that don't deal with the topics of the nine dedicated sites.

[gabeana]

12. Thanks appreciate it

[tblue37]

13. You're welcome! nt

[3catwoman3]

6. I would also love a link.

I am a "word nerd" and quite fanatic about proper usage.

[tblue37]

9. See the post directly above yours for links to my ten public sites. nt

[3catwoman3]

10. Thank you...

...very much. I am sure I will enjoy your work.

[tblue37]

11. I hope so, but be careful. I have about 450 articles spread across my ten sites, and

I often get emails from readers telling me they just kept reading them (you know, like Lay's potato chips--you can't eat just one) until they realized they had stayed up all night doing so.

I write on a lot of different topics, so their curiosity just kept pushing them from one article to the next.

[3catwoman3]

15. I am fortunate enough to only work 2 days...

...a week, so I have a lot of free time, and typically fall asleep while reading something because I don't stop until I am so tired that I can only focus with my dominant eye.

Seeing as I work tomorrrow, I won't open any of your links until tomorrow night.

Thanks again!

[ProudLib72]

7. I just checked a story I wrote

It went from very easy readability at a 7th grade level at the beginning to a difficult readability 10th or 11th grade level in the middle.

In other words, tRump may have captured lightning in a bottle for a few lines, and that placed him in the 4th grade.

[Cha]

14. What took them?