Hello, boys and girls! Are you enjoying your Saturday so far? Me, too!! Did you see the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden Thursday? Both are running for the office of Vice President, which means if the person who is running with them on what is called a “ticket” for President gets elected and dies in office, one of them could become the President! The President is like the boss of the U.S when it comes to things involving who decides what for the people of the U.S.A.
There might be a little more to it than that, but that’s how our present President, a man named George W. Bush, sees his job — as The Decider.
Here is an interesting story from CNN, which is part of what is called cable television, which provides the shows that you watch that have lots and lots of loud yelling, such as Jerry Springer and Bill O’Reilly. You can tell Springer apart from O’Reilly because Springer wears glasses.
The story says — or, really the person who WROTE the story says — that during these debates when Biden and Palin talked about good and bad things facing the U.S. Sarah Palin actually spoke at a higher grade level than Joe Biden. Here are some highlights. If you want to find out more click on THIS LINE which is called a hyperlink:
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.
The analysis by the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor said Palin, governor of Alaska and the GOP vice presidential nominee, used the passive voice in 8 percent of her sentences, far more than the 5 percent used by the Democratic senator from Delaware.
The analysis noted that the “passive voice can be used to deflect responsibility; Biden used active voice when referring to [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [President] Bush; Palin countered with passive deflections.”
“It obscures the doer of the action,” said Language Monitor President Paul Payack, an independent with no political affiliation.
The two candidates were nearly even in total number of words spoken. The normally voluble Biden restrained his tendency to ramble by uttering just 5,492 words during the 90-minute debate, versus 5,235 for Palin, Payack said.
In last week’s debate between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, Obama spoke 8,068 words during the 90-minute event, while McCain spoke 7,150, Payack said.
And there’s more so click on the boldfaced (dark colored) link under this sentence and after this period(which is this .).
Thursday night’s debate between the vice presidential candidates “was more collegial, thinking out loud as opposed to just hammering points,” Payack said in trying to explain the difference. “It was a much calmer style.”
His analysis ranked the candidates’ speech on several other levels, too. Here’s the breakdown:
Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)
Sentences per paragraph: statistically tied at 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.
Letters per word: tied at 4.4.
Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.
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.
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:
Can you imagine that?
Biden spoke at middle school level. Palin spoke at high school level.
There are some who think sites called “weblogs” also talk way down to their readers, too, maybe even down to a lower grade level than the two people who want people to like them so they can be Vice President.
But those people are just a bunch of pooh-pooh heads….
HERE ARE SOME OTHERS WHO ALSO READ ARTICLES WRITTEN BY OTHER PEOPLE AND COPY THEM AND THEN TELL YOU WHAT THEY THINK OF THEM, JUST LIKE ME!:
Does CNN have even the slightest idea what it’s reporting here? For that matter do the people running Global Language Monitor, whom CNN relies upon, understand the ‘research’ they’re doing? It’s hard to shake the feeling that ignoramuses are getting paid good money to churn out this kind of junk.
Doubly ironic then that both of the reports linked to above seem to imply that Sarah Palin showed more intelligence in her speech patterns during the vice presidential debate than Joe Biden did. And here you thought her gibberish and cutesy patter marked Palin pretty definitely as a dope. You betcha.
Palin, frosh. Biden … still in junior high.
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.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey actually did some work as a defense contractor related to reading levels. He writes in a MUST READ:
I expect that many people will try to make something of the CNN report that Sarah Palin spoke at a higher grade level than did Joe Biden during their debate. It certainly lends itself to all kinds of humor and a certain amount of political schadenfreude regarding Biden’s pomposity and conceit regarding his intelligence. However, this really means much less than it seems:
Read the details in full.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.