Fourth grade
Newsweek reported last week – confirming what we all know – that Trump has the worst language skills of any of the last 15 presidents.
The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.
At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.
I think the ones at the higher end pull their punches in the language department, i.e. they try not to talk over the population’s heads. We know Obama is very good at code-switching. I’m guessing that Hoover the engineer was lousy at code-switching in much the same way he was lousy at adapting engineer-think to the conditions of the Depression. In other words I really doubt that Harvard Law Obama has worse language skills than Hoover. At the other end though the effort is all to sound higher up the scale; I don’t think Trump is faking or code switching.
Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.
The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.
The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.
“By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,” Factba.se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. “The gap between Trump and the next closest president … is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.”
Zero surprise there, but it’s nice to have it quantified.
“… significantly more simple… than any president since Herbert Hoover…”
That phrasing to me implies that Hoover was the most recent president who used a simpler vocabulary. Instead, they mean that Trump had the simplest vocabulary of any president they looked at, and they started at Hoover. (It’s entirely possible Trump has the simplest vocabulary of any president, period.) I’m not sure of a concise way to express the concept concisely; “since at least before Hoover”, maybe?
I imagine they don’t have many unscripted recorded speeches for any president prior to Hoover – if any. Although radio was around for some of them, it wasn’t yet the ubiquitous medium.
I agree, Sackbut, I think that could have been worded much better, and possibly clarify that point – that he has worse language skills than any president we have information for. Maybe they headlined it the way they did so people would click to see who had worse language skills than Trump?
I have personally know several parakeets that would have outperformed the orange one any time.
Just out of interest, what age are fourth graders? In our schools’ ‘year’ system, year 4 pupils are aged 8-9, but that sounds a little old for Trump’s abilities.
Not wanting to do any more research than these researchers, I do harbor a degree of suspicion for laziness on the part of linguistic scholars who go to unchartered sources. (Factba.se may well have been meticulous in their methods; I just won’t bother to look ;) ) My scepticism stems from an incident in the late 1960’s where a budding Swedish linguist cut his cane and degree by harnessing Electronic Computers! to count and catalogue the words used in debates by law makers in Riksdagen. Only, his source was the somewhat heavily edited printed minutes instead of the actual words spoken. Even to me as a teenager, this cast his entire scientific approach under serious doubt. Not so the Swedish Academy, to which he was later invited and became its Permanent Secretary for many years.
Then again, it was mostly turtles both before and after him; witness the #metoo Arnaud scandal lately. (There is an untranslatable pun going around concerning his first name and what he is accused of. Maybe if he had been called Jean-Paw?) :)
That is not to be taken as disagreement with the overarching thesis that this incumbent is barely vocal, let alone literate, regardless of volume.
Acolyte – 8-9 would be accurate here, too.
I must admit that I am surprised at the high score for Trump. Both my youngest grandsons (one just turned seven, the other about to) have better vocabularies, and are far better at explaining a coherent thought-process. Even my five-year-old granddaughter is more expressive and coherent, has a better sense of humour and a better grasp of inter-personal relationships. Hell, even my three-year-old granddaughter, whose language skills come closest to that of the US president, has more compassion than he does; she likes to help her little sister (21 months) when the latter has difficulty with manipulating a toy, and will spontaneously try to make her feel better if she cries.
Re the grade level;
Many of us know (or were) kids who read well above nominal grade level when very young. Don’t think so much of how well a nine-year-old reads, but what the minimal expectation of reading skill might be for that child.