Why Presidential Speeches Are Getting "Dumber"

this is the first sentence of George Washington's first inaugural address among the vicissitudes incident life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order and received on the 14th day of the present month Washington's speech was at a college reading level grade 20 fast forward two hundred and twenty years and Obama's inaugural address was the reading level of a high school freshman Trump's inaugural address eight years later was that a middle school reading level and here is the reading level of every president in between talk about a downward trend it's because of something that happened here there is no mention of the State of the Union or the inaugural address in the Constitution but George Washington made speeches for both anyway of course he was just addressing Congress which was around 80 of his fellow rich white male friends the flesh Kincaid reading ease formula ranks it as one of the most difficult speeches in American history it's what researchers used to rank the difficulty of all of these speeches the formula was originally developed by the US Navy in the 1970s to determine how clear military instruction manuals were it measured two variables the amount of syllables in a word and the number of words in a sentence so a blurb like cheddar is a cool company we make fun videos sometimes therefore learning therefore an online website called YouTube we also have two TV channels it's fun to see our YouTube videos on TV then our parents actually think that we have jobs as a flesh Kinkaid reading a score of 82 making it a 4th grade reading level and a blurb like this at cheddar we make engaging an informative video content for YouTube viewers that want answers to questions they never realize they had cheddar posts these informative and enlightening videos on a digital platform called YouTube the explanatory videos are also broadcasted on Cheddar's to cable TV channels it's fulfilling and exhilarating to see our content shared on cable news has a Flesch reading ease score of 45 making it an 11th grade reading level as you can see or here this scale is just based on syllables and sentence length not the ideas actually being conveyed which are the same in both of these blurbs but it's a good indicator of how difficult presidential speeches are but you might be thinking Allie that's not very scientific method of you what about the content of these speeches and you'd be right which is why we're going to look at the top 15 words mentioned in speeches by every president since Eisenhower let's get that out onto a graph nice now that we've got that laid out let's look at the differences between these lists LBJ and Nixon both talk about Vietnam Carter and Reagan have mentions of the Soviet Union and nuclear fears Bush and his son both have Saddam on their lists variations of the word Iraq or Isis also show up on Obama and Trump's list but besides these periods specific issues the topics are pretty similar themes like the economy party lines health and energy show up again and again mentions of political opponents and the president's loved ones also show up frequently the similarities vastly outweigh the differences so we know that while rhetorical difficulty has declined the topics have remained somewhat similar what gives we can trace it back to a rhetorical drop-off in the 1920s this dip right here but what actually caused the decline there were three big shifts in our democracy that caused not the politicians but the constituents to change the first big change to the voting population took place in 1913 with the passing of the 17th amendment it allowed for the direct election of senators previously senators had been elected by the state legislatures it was changed because there were some significant problems with that process state legislators would become deadlocked for months leading to Senate vacancies in other cases political machines would gain control over the state legislatures and the elected senators were considered their puppets according to Brown University's political review the second was in 1920 the 19th amendment was passed giving women the right to vote I don't think I need to explain what was going on previously the third was a countrywide shift towards more and better public education more young Americans became involved in politics than ever before but with these three changes and the advent of the radio presidents now had to speak to people they never addressed before people who didn't know or care how high society their speeches sounded they wanted someone who sounded like them and they weren't talking with college level rhetoric in day to day life there has been a lot more change in the past five years than just getting a new president in fact the entire way we consume news and media has changed from cable TV and newspapers to YouTube smash highlights and politicians duking it out on Twitter like in the 1920s politics is facing a radical shift towards being even more in line with average American communication you can e-mail or tweet any politician at any time and they're pretty likely to see it that means that politicians communications are trying to be as accessible to the general population as possible it's a contributing factor as to why rhetoric has taken a nosedive things are changing rapidly but it's this tide of change a good thing or a bad thing we'll let you decide let us know in the comments what you think of the downward slide of presidential rhetoric and the upward structure II of understanding like comment subscribe ring the bell for post notifications and thanks for watching this video we'll see you around next time

Channel: Cheddar

Views: 814,238

Rating: 4.6031895 out of 5

Keywords: Cheddar, trump, Donald Trump, George Washington, Obama, Barack Obama, president, Presidential, United Stares, America, History, Speeches, Politics, political, speeches, election, reading, linguistics, education

Id: N5HbFfxWILY

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Clbull]

Give it a few years and debates will be like that election episode of Community where Magnitude was one of the two last remaining candidates.

[u/throwaway10402019]

At least Obama did stuff for science. 2014 was the last great year.

[u/Lensman842]

I'm still waiting on ass the movie. Come on people. I know you have it in you.