A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

29 January 2015

Bullock equals Obama on major address reading ease scores

bullock_left_150 Obama_india

President Barack Obama and Governor Steve Bullock don’t have the same speechwriter, but if the reading ease scores (below) of the U.S. State of the Union and the MT State of the State addresses are any indication, their speechwriters have much the same approach to writing major speeches. In fact, the numerical similarities are downright uncanny.

Technical note. Flesch-Kincaid scores are calculated by many applications, Microsoft Word among them. I used the free, open source application Flesh and for counting paragraphs, BBEdit. How a reading ease calculator is set up affects the scores slightly. I configured Flesh to treat semicolons and colons as periods, which shortens sentences and can result in lower grade level and higher reading ease scores (in SOTS and SOTU speeches, colons and semicolons are not major factors; indeed, they’re not much used). I omitted headings in the SOTS file I used for analysis.

This was one of Bullock’s better speeches, both for content and style.

bullock_v_obama