From: pcorless@cisco.com (Peter Corless)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: Bush & Clinton Acceptance Speeches
Date: 26 Sep 92 03:23:53 GMT
Reply-To: pcorless@cisco.com (Peter Corless)
Organization: Computer Science Lab, SRI International
NNTP-Posting-Host: corless-mac.cisco.com

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.
Xref: sparky alt.politics.clinton:8702 talk.politics.misc:49830