Congress is stupider than before

They've dropped a whole grade level in speech patterns since 2005. Guess who brought down the curve?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/spee ... 51897.html

The Sunlight Foundation determined that Congress is talking at nearly a full grade level below the level at which members spoke seven years ago, according to its study of the Congressional Record—the official record of members' proceedings and speech. The foundation applied the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test to congressional conversations and found that today's Congress speaks "at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005," senior fellow Lee Drutman wrote in his analysis. Sunlight also found that the newest as well as the most conservative members of Congress on average speak at the lowest grade level.

Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina scored lowest with a 7.9 grade level average for his speech. But he told Yahoo News Monday that although he doesn't believe anyone equates "sentence length" and the "polysyllabic nature of words" with intelligence, his ranking is something to be proud of.

The dumbing down of America, Thank you Tea Party. I feel so much better since you entered the picture.

Media to blame? Soundbites being more effective than lengthy explanations. Like Obama going with hope and change instead of a detailed platform.

FredHayek wrote: Media to blame? Soundbites being more effective than lengthy explanations. Like Obama going with hope and change instead of a detailed platform.

partly I think but we have some responsibility to think for ourselves.Some will follow and some will think for themselves. Independents rule.

But they did manage to declare that pizza is a vegetable!

Irrelevant. The congressional record is a documentation of all the blowhard's pompous speeches that nobody listens to anyway. I watched some on CSPAN and it made me sick.

We listened to this story today and had to stop it to say "what a bunch of crap" to try to spin this information like this.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics ... ws?print=1

Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer sentences and words with more syllables. <-- BS!


There was one congressman interviewed that put it in the right context: To be a good writer or speaker, you should write/speak in clear terms that people can understand. They used one Congressman's loooooong run on "sentence" that contained 62 words as an example of "higher" speech. Really?

For example, just one sentence from the member of Congress with the highest grade ranking, Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California, goes on for 62 words. (That sentence: "This Justice Department, in my judgment, based on the experience I've had here in this Congress, 18 years, my years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.")

The whole story really ticked me off. The media is not helping anyone come together in this country, just trying to make everything us and them.
Here, I found the quote:

South Carolina Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney ranks the very lowest, with a grade level of 7.94.

"Gosh, I guess I should be disappointed that I'm not using my higher education to better use, but, oh well," Mulvaney says. "I hope people don't take it as a substitute for lack of intellect, but small words can be just as powerful as big words sometimes."

Mulvaney graduated with honors from Georgetown and earned a law degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His father was a high school grammar teacher.

"I was trained to write in a clear and concise fashion, and you didn't use big words if small words would do," he says. "Certainly I'm not trying to dumb down the message by any stretch of the imagination."

I agree with Mulvaney 100% on this

It is hardly restricted to congress. Just the other day a reporter on 60 minutes used parasitic to describe a symbiotic relationship.

This story was about the number of words and number of syllables used to judge someone's level of speaking. Now, mixing up words is a totally different topic.

Well let me start by saying that indeed congress is stupider than before but it has no bearing whatsoever on the number of words and syllables as they can be equally as stupid whether they use longer or shorter words, so the article is very misleading and in other words as Wily said "what a bunch of crap".

Was that long enough?