10 February 2023 — 0800mst
Biden’s SOTU speech had milkman readability
Donald Trump’s SOTU addresses took longer
to deliver, but Joe Biden’s contained more words
By James Conner
Does Joe Biden actually talk almost twice as fast as Donald Trump? No. But one could think so after a cursory look at these State of the Union address statistics.
What accounts for Biden’s apparent 50 percent great rate of speech? Applause, most likely. Trump received more and longer bursts of applause, and that lengthened the delivery time of his speeches, which contained far fewer words than Biden’s speeches.
A glut of reading ease scores for Biden
Studying journalism half a century ago, I learned that most news stories were written to be understood easily by a milkman with an eighth grade education. There was a reason for that. No, there weren’t that many milkmen, but almost 45 percent of the 25 and older population had less than a high school education.
Today, only nine percent of the 25 and older population has less than a high school diploma (Census Bureau 2020 Educational Attainment Tables). But the standard reading ease scores for SOTU speeches as delivered has declined from a grade level of 11.8 for Richard Nixon to 6.5 for Joe Biden in 2023 (source: The state of our union is … dumber:). James Madison hold the dubious honor of delivering the SOTU message with the highest Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 21.6, which is post doctoral. I’m glad he was less prolix when he helped write our constitution.
The Guardian’s headline notwithstanding, the content of SOTUs has not been dumbed down. Rather, the language has been simplified to better approximate spoken language. Sentences and paragraphs are shorter, which makes a big difference in readability scores such as the Flesch-Kincaid indices. Plain talkin’ is the prime objective, especially for politicians such as Biden who are known for their folksiness.
Plain talkin’ does not by definition exclude elegance and eloquence, but in practice it sometimes does. But it gets the basic message across to the greatest number of Americans.
Linguists have developed a number computational assessments of readability, the Flesch-Kincaid tests, which are part of Microsoft Word, being the most popular. They do not detect gibberish, but they do provide decent quantifications of complexity, and sometimes are useful for authors who are writing for a specific level of reading ability. One of their first applications was in writing for military equipment manuals that could be easily and fully understood by enlisted men with substandard educations.
Some years ago, I acquired Word Counter, a Mac app no longer available, that calculates a couple dozen readability scores. You may recognize some. I ran Biden’s 2023 SOTU speech through Word Counter. Here are the results (download spreadsheet).