Suggests that many Americans, when choosing who to vote for in the
presidential election, choose the man whose words least overestimate his
literacy. Mary-An Leon and T. Harrell Allen of California State;
Analyzing candidates' comments; Eighth-grade level; Bush/Dukakis
example.
By
PT Staff, published on March 01, 1992
Election Debates
IT'S ALMOST TIME TO CHOOSE A President again, so you can count on
televised debates and analysis by political pundits.
No one knows for sure how the debates actually influence our voting
decision. But the findings of a team of California researchers offers a
disturbing suggestion: It may be simply that Americans choose the man
whose words least overestimate his literacy.
Some candidates are more successful than others in getting their
messages across in presidential debates, report Mary-Ann Leon and T.
Harrell Allen, of California State Polytechnic University. They are the
ones who talk to us as if we were in the eighth grade.
Leon and Allen analyze candidates' comments by holding them up
against the standards applied in readability tests, in such areas as
grammar and sentence length. They let the computer do the
sentence-crunching on transcripts of two 1988 presidential
debates.
By these standards, George Bush proved easier to understand than
Michael Dukakis. In both debates, Bush's remarks were at the eighth-grade
reading level, making them comprehensible to more than two-thirds of
Americans.
Dukakis, on the other hand, spoke in longer, more complex
sentences. His words scored at the 10th- and 12th-grade level,
comprehensible to only about half the audience.
Just like the computer, most political pundits at the time gave
winning marks to Bush. Good thing they didn't put it through a
mathematics program. Then we'd know for sure it's called the lowest
common denominator.
Photo: BUSH'S ADVICE: Go to the back of the class--and win the
election. ((c) Dirck Halstead/Gamma-Liaison)
Tags:
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