In the News

Reprinted with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica

Bush, Gore Keep Their Talk Plain

(Britannica.com), Oct. 11, 2000 - If the language used in this year's presidential debates seems a little, well, basic to you, there may be a good reason for that. According to a study by the website yourDictionary.com, the language used by Al Gore and George W. Bush during their first debate October 3 was at the eighth- and seventh-grade reading levels, respectively. Their running mates Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney spoke at about the tenth- and ninth-grade levels, respectively, when they squared off October 5.

The study is based on the widely-used Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale, which analyzes language according to factors such as word length and sentence length. Another study, by the Princeton Review, found similar results.

The yourDictionary.com study suggests that this year's debates are a slight improvement over the 1996 Bill Clinton-Robert Dole debates, in which Clinton's language registered at about an eighth-grade reading level and Dole's at about a sixth-grade level. The most sophisticated presidential debate of the last 20 years in terms of language was the 1980 Ronald Reagan-Jimmy Carter debate, in which Reagan used language at a reading level slightly above the 10th grade while Carter spoke at the 12th-grade level, the study found.

The authors of the study also looked at historical examples of political speeches and found that during the landmark Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates in 1858, the language used by Stephen Douglas registered at about the 12th-grade level, while that used by Abraham Lincoln was at roughly the 11th-grade level.

©2001 Encyclopaedia Britannica