Immanence

Lexical statistics suggest that Kucinich and Obama are still too intellectual in their speeches

Since I switched to english for this blog — except for a few one-liners auto-imported from Twitter when I post there — I’ve been using a plugin that computes some lexical statistics to try and improve my writing. I tend to write wordy and confusing paragraphs more often than I wish I would because (1) trees of subordinate clauses are more common in my native language and people parse them better, in part because there are more clause connectives specifying the structure of complicated sentences, (2) lots of latin and greek-derived words are colloquial in latin-derived languages like portuguese but stuffy and academic in english and (3) sometimes my english plain sucks, and my old portuguese-speaking readers do complain.

So, anyway — I’ve been posting transcripts from the DNCC, and my edit box will automatically compute those lexical stats I mentioned. For the sake of full methodological disclaimer, these have a small margin of error since they include my very brief opening remark — two sentences at most — and I don’t have enough free time to dick around some more, but those shouldn’t introduce statistical biases  in analyzing texts that have upwards of 100 sentences — so pretend you didn’t read this note.

Kucinich’s “Wake up, America” has a fog index of 11.1. This is supposed to approximate how many years of basic education someone needs  to fully grasp a text. Another measure is the Kincaid number, coputed to be 7.2 for that speech. Kincaid’s statistic is another approximation of the number of years needed to grok a text. Finally, the Flesch statistic is 41. This index is a higher-is-easier number; according to Wikipedia,  scores of 90.0-100.0 are considered easily understandable by an average 11-year old student;  13- to 15-year old students could easily understand passages with a score of 60-70, and passages with results of 0-30 are best understood by college graduates; Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s.

For Barack Obama’s final DNCC speech, the fog, Kincaid and Flesch numbers are 12.4, 9.1 and 66. On two out of three measurements Barack’s harder to grasp than Kucinich, but this might be biased by the sheer difference in text length: Kucinich spoke approx. 546 words, while Barack’s talk ammounted to approx. 4689 words. What will be interesting is the comparison between DNCC and RNCC speeches; I might go out of my way to compute stats for all the speeches available in the convention websites to give a better idea of how high-brow each party goes.

(Heart disclaimer: I’m a ron-paulite-for-obama type.)

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America, Barack Obama, Blog, free time, Harvard, Law Review, lexical analysis, needed, Paragraph, Portuguese, Reader's Digest, Sake, statistics, stuff, Suck, Texts, twitter, Wikipedia, Zing

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