A fun game - Readability of Speeches

[quiversR4hunting]

Trump makes me insane. His speeches make me cringe. If he wrote the way he spoke on this snark forum we (and I am NOT part of the grammer police) would make fun of him. With all that being said, I thought it might be fun for us to put some of his speeches in the Readability website.

Website: https://readability-score.com/text/ The website says:

Quote

A grade level (based on the USA education system) is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. A score of around 10-12 is roughly the reading level on completion of high school. Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.

I will use a Pres. Obama speech as a first example. This is from his final press conference. I found the transcript here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/18/remarks-president-final-press-conference I took his 2nd paragraph which is 2 sentences long.

Quote

I covered a lot of the ground that I would want to cover in my farewell address last week.  So I'm just going to say a couple of quick things before I start taking questions.

This scored: Average Grade Level 7.5

Here is a Q&A from Trump. (I only put his Answer in the meter.) Source: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-literary-dividing-line-between-trump-and-obama?cid=sm_fb_maddow

Quote

Trump showed them John Ferling’ “Adams v Jefferson,” which was on his desk. Asked if they should read it, the president-elect said, “No, I wouldn’t.” It led to this exchange:

Q: Is there [a book] you actually like that you’d recommend?

TRUMP: I like a lot of books. I like reading books. I don’t have the time to read very much now in terms of the books, but I like reading them. This one is just one that just came out. CNN. The CNN book just came out.

Trump's answer scored: Average Grade Level 1.8

We could do it for any of the people in politics. Then again, we may end up all depressed.

[VixenToast]

Oh god, this could be fun. Hehehehehe

[candygirl200413]

We used this in one of my health classes when discussing to make health materials readable for everyone.

This will be real interesting to see tomorrow with his oh so wonderful speech

[quiversR4hunting]

Quote

Murray: "Can you commit to us tonight that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?"

DeVos: "Senator, thanks for that question. I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk about how we address the needs of all parents and all students. And we acknowledge today that not all schools are working for the students that are assigned to them. And I'm hopeful that we can work together to find common ground and ways that we can solve those issues and empower parents to make choices on behalf of their children that are right for them."

For another example. DeVos's answer above read at 9.3 (Flesch-Kincaid 8.1)

The link above only lets you do a couple then you need to buy it. But I found Word will do it for you but only give you the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

The Trump section above scored 0.0 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level in Word.

[VixenToast]

I wonder what his speech was? Then we can determine if he likely wrote it. Lmao. Which I'm sure he did, parts of it sounded charismatic but mostly just him.

[GreyhoundFan]

6 hours ago, VixenToast said:

I wonder what his speech was? Then we can determine if he likely wrote it. Lmao. Which I'm sure he did, parts of it sounded charismatic but mostly just him.

Here's the full transcript, if you are interested. The consensus amongst many commentators is that it reeks of Bannon.