From: pcorless@cisco.com (Peter Corless)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: Clinton/Bush Speeches Compared
Date: 2 Oct 92 01:50:41 GMT
Reply-To: pcorless@cisco.com (Peter Corless)
Organization: Computer Science Lab, SRI International
NNTP-Posting-Host: corless-mac.cisco.com

For some reason, this keeps disappearing on me....
Here it is again....
-Peter C.
-----

After posting the other day regarding the poor quality of Mr. Bush's
acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, I was asked
to do a similar analysis of Mr. Clinton's speech before the
Democratic convention. Fair is fair, so here is my side-by-side
analysis of the major candidate's reading (and speaking)
comprehensibility.

I subjected both candidates' acceptance speeches to the grammar
checker in Microsoft Word 4.0 (Macintosh version). Here's the basic
stats:

                     Bill Clinton    George Bush
                     ------------    -----------
Words in speech              3854           4934
Sent. in speech               378            330
Avg Sent. Length       10.2 words     14.9 words
% Passive Sent.                6%             6%
Flesch Grade Level            7.8            7.9
Gunning Fog Index             8.8            9.1

Truthfully, Clinton's speech is slightly shorter... I pasted one
paragraph in twice. (Oops.) It's still good enough for a basic
comparison.

What this tells us is that Bush took about 25% more words to make his
acceptance speech than Clinton. To balance that out, he had fewer but
much lengthier sentences. Still, each candidate used about the same
level of language complexity. Bush's longer sentence length tended to
make his speech a bit tougher to comprehend, but not much. So much for
the basics.

Next, I personally tallied the number of occurances of each type of
gramatical error, and discarded instances where the computer could not
distinguish proper contextual usage:

Types of Errors (# of such errors/ % sentences with this error)
                     Bill Clinton    George Bush
                     ------------    -----------
Passive Sent.            20/ 5.3%       20/ 6.0%
Incomplete Sent.         24/ 6.3%        9/ 2.7%
No apparent clause        5/ 1.3%        5/ 1.5%
Run-on Sent.              5/ 1.3%       16/ 4.8%
Long seq. of
   prep. phrases          2/  .5%        0/   0%

Sent.start w/ "And"      23/ 6.1%       80/24.2%
Sent.start w/ "But"      22/ 5.8%       10/ 3.0%
Sent.start w/ "Or"        0/   0%        2/  .6%
(Total sent.
 start. w/ conjunct)    (45/11.9%)     (92/27.8%)

Informal usage            4/ 1.1%        4/ 1.2%
Overused modifiers
 (e.g.: "in fact")        3/  .8%        1/  .3%
Archaic expression        0/   0%        1/  .3%
Cliche                    0/   0%        2/  .6%
Repl."like" w/ "as"       1/  .3%        2/  .6%
Repl."which" w/ "that"    0/   0%        1/  .3%
Inappr. punct.
   (";" "," "--")         4/ 1.1%        4/ 1.2%
                     ------------    -----------
Total Errors            113/29.9%      159/48.2%

Rate of Error
 (Errors per 100 Words)      2.93           3.22

Yes, I know you can't just "add" percentages like this, but I
wasn't a math major. Again, it's just to show a trend, not to
get a PhD thesis.

The total number of errors and especially the percentage of errors
per sentence shows that Mr. Clinton's speech was better written
than Mr. Bush's.

Even the Rate of Error comparison shows that Mr. Bush flubbed more
often than Mr. Clinton per 100 words of speech, although it certainly
helps narrows his deficit.

Reading each speech side-by-side helped further this analysis.

Basically, Mr. Bush wrote long, run-on and repetitive sentences. His
most common repetition errors occurred at the start of sentences,
giving his speech a kind of "Foghorn Leghorn" sound to it...

Bush: "And two days--listen to this now--two days after Congress
followed my lead..."

..and later: "I extended my hand--and I think the American people
know this--I extended my hand to the congressional leaders, the
Democratic leaders, and they bit it."

Even if Mr. Bush managed to keep his sentence length down, he
consistently ran sentences together with conjunctions, especially
"and" -- every fourth sentence in his speech began with "and!"

Clinton's problem was his use of shorter yet often fragmentary
sentences. This, however, often made his speech punchier and more
understandable:

Clinton: (Speaking about common scapegoats for the nation's
problems):

"Them. Them the minorities. Them the liberals. Them, them, them.
But there is no them; there's only us."

In other instances when Clinton used repetition, it was as a
refrain to his major points:

Clinton: "Well, he promised us 15 million new jobs by now.
And he's over 14 million jobs short. We can do better.

  "He has raised taxes on the people who drive pick-up trucks, and
lowered taxes on people who ride in limousines. We can do better.

  "He promised to balance the budget, but he didn't even try. In
fact, the budgets he submitted have nearly doubled the debt. Even
worse, he wasted the money and reduced our investments in education
and jobs. We can do better."

Clearly, much more effective use of repetition!

Both tend to use the same quantity of passive verb constructions,
so that's a wash. Even though the percentage of passive constructions
is not that great, it is large enough to help explain why people don't
get too excited after hearing these two men speak.

If anyone from either campaign reads this message, I hope they benefit
from it. We need more coherent and understandable leadership. People
are looking for specifics, clarity and action... in both the
candidate's lives and their words!

-Peter Corless.
pcorless@cisco.com - these ideas are my own creation and responsibility.
Xref: sparky alt.politics.clinton:7721 talk.politics.misc:48527