UNDERNEWS: Trump talks (and thinks) like a third grader

August 14, 2015

Trump talks (and thinks) like a third grader

Politico - In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score. Trump’s low grade at the debates wasn’t a fluke. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Talking at a 4th grade level is how he gets the support he gets: people at all levels of cognitive ability can understand him.

I've a grad-school education and an outstanding (99.9%ile on the GRE) command of English, yet there are those -generally academics- who write so opaquely that I consciously have to read and work out the meaning word by word.

The late Richard Feynman wrote that he once thought he was losing his grip when he read a paper in his field and didn't understand it. His spouse reassured him that it was just bad writing and he was sure to understand it if he read it word by word. So that's what he did, and felt reassured.; August 14, 2015 at 2:29 PM

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