I guess you can measure anything....A group took 530 members of Congress and ranked them by grade level according to the length of words and sentences in speeches they gave.
The idea is to determine who speaks intelletually at the highest level, and our Congressman scores well. Rep. Bill Owens speaks at a grade 12.8 level.
Since he spent his career as one of Plattsburgh's top lawyers, I would hope he can articulate, but nonetheless, having a Congressman who scores towards the top in this category is better than the alternative.
We need to rank our local officials too, except some of them never say anything. I remember covering as a newsman the old 34 member Jefferson County Board of Supervisors. I'll bet you in a given year, 20 of them never uttered a word...What grade level does that get you ?
Watertown Daily Times | Owens speaks more better than other NY senators, reps
5 comments:
A closed mouth catches no flies, and with the gotcha bloggers masquerading as journalists these days, that's probably a career-saver.
It got them reelected each term, and health care to boot.
Long sentences and polysyllabic words is the epitome of pseudo intellectualism. The purpose of articulating is to communicate and you must speak the language at the level of your audience to effectively communicate. Does Owens remember that he is a democrat and so should speak jive for most of his party to understand? In fact by definition scoring higher on this test means you are harder to understand.
A better test for this pompous parlance would be to score each word for its frequency of occurrence in the English written language. un·for·tu·nate·ly, there are many common imprecise ambiguous flowery polysyllabic words that add nothing of substance when it comes to articulating a thought. But I guess when your thoughts are, "we need more free stuff" you better come up with a new way to say that each time.
But I guess when your thoughts are, "we need more free stuff" you better come up with a new way to say that each time."
And absolutely no one knows this better than you.
I've never heard Owens/Pelosi speak. I've heard muffled sounds from under the desk. I just thought there was a mouse in the room.
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