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[qqqbear]

Debate analysis: Palin spoke at 10th-grade level, Biden at eighth
Story Highlights
Language monitoring service says Palin spoke at 9.5, Biden at 7.8

Candidates tied at sentences per paragraph and letters per word

Higher grade level doesn''t mean a better sentence, expert says

(CNN) -- 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.

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:

"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."

[meg-abear]

our Founding Fathers spoke and it''s pathetic.   People think we''re all so smart today when the opposite is true. Back when Thomas Paine wrote "Common Sense" some estimates put the free population as 95% literate in men and 60% literate in women.

Reading as Common Sense

When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception equaled that of today''s pop star. Alexis de Toqueville, who visited America a few decades earlier, might have predicted such a reception. He was astonished at the quantity of newspapers.

American newspaper publishing quickly grew into a widespread and powerful tradition. By 1730, there were seven newspapers published on the Eastern seaboard. Seventy years later there were 180 - more than twice the number available in England, which had a population half the size.

In the second half of the 17th century, the literacy rate for adult men in New England is estimated to have been as high as 95%, more than twice the estimated literacy rate for men in England. American women had literacy rates higher than 60%. Nowhere in the world was literacy greater.

In Colonial America, reading was not regarded as an elitist activity; it was regarded as an essential and popular activity. Reading was, as one historian put it, "the product of a busy, mobile society" and its spread is easily linked with the increasing interest in self-determination.

"Almost every man is a reader," wrote the Reverend Jacob Duche in 1772. Duche didn''t have to go far from his church at 3rd and Pine Streets, to find evidence to support this observation. "The poorest laborer upon the shores of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentlemen or scholar... such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind..."

In another four years, Thomas Paine''s Common Sense would be stirring those debates. First published in January 1776, Common Sense sold more than 100,000 copies within the first two months. That''s equal to a million copies in today''s market. But there was more. Within the year, an estimated 400,000 copies were printed for a nation of three million independence-minded people. To find a comparable, contemporary success, we''d have to compare Common Sense to the popular, albeit lesser cultural event: the Super Bowl.

After the Revolutionary War, Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books. Of course, Franklin had helped forge the new nation. And Franklin had helped set the stage for independence by feeding the literacy that stoked the desire for it. More than four decades before 1776, Franklin wrote "an innocent Plowman is more worth than a vicious Prince." The fact that so many could read this idea is remarkable.

That so many accepted this revolutionary idea as common sense -- that made America unique.

- Kenneth FInkel, Executive Director of WHYY''s Arts & Culture Service

[Thomas]

and which candidate was working their linguistic skills at full throttle?