Amusingly, for all the talk — in these pixels included — about Sarah Palin’s lack of preparedness and Joe Biden’s seasoning, one professional analyst finds that Palin outshone Biden in the vice presidential debate.
An analysis carried out by a language monitoring service said Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night’s debate between the vice presidential candidates.
She shouldn’t be too smug about, it though:
The analysis said Abraham Lincoln spoke at an 11th-grade level during his seven debates in 1858 against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas in their race for a Senate seat from Illinois.
And then there’s this:
But higher grade level doesn’t necessarily mean better sentence, Payack said. He pointed to Palin’s second-to-last sentence in the debate, which the formula put at a grade level of 18.3: “What I would do, also, if that were ever to happen, though, is to continue the good work he is so committed to of putting government back on the side of the people and get rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington,” Palin said. “When she said it, it sounded good, but on paper it’s a completely different animal,” Payack said. “It’s like, what is that?”
But Biden had his own challenging moments, such as this 32-word gem, rated grade 15.6: “The middle class under John McCain’s tax proposal, 100 million families, middle-class families, households to be precise, they got not a single change; they got not a single break in taxes.” Payack praised the usually longer-winded Biden for showing restraint here. “In a typical Joe Biden thing, this sentence would serve as a launching point to even more complex and convoluted statements. Last night, he was particularly reserved, and you only had to be a college graduate to decipher it, according to the readability statistics.”
I wouldn’t want to try to diagram either of those sentences.
via Memeorandum
