The media is disappointed to discover Sarah Palin isn’t actually illiterate:
AOL Weird News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor’s emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said.
“I’m a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate,” said 2tor Chief Executive Officer John Katzman. “However, the emails say something else. Ms. Palin writes emails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5.
“If she were a student and showing me her work, I’d say ‘It’s fine, clear writing,'” he said, admitting that emails he wrote scored lower than Palin’s on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test…. [Editor’s Note: In the interest of fairness, the writer submitted his own work for scrutiny. His recent piece, on a New York man trying to row across the Atlantic Ocean is on the 8.8 grade level, Payack said.]
Out of curiosity, I popped my most recent column into the Readability Calculator: “Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 13.10”. And my recent email to KW came in at 14.74. How fortunate that so many more Americans are now attending college, otherwise I might fear for my mass appeal. Still, I am forced to conclude that the newspaper editors of America knew precisely what they were doing when they uniformly, (with the sole exception of the Dallas Morning News), turned down my column during my brief, but glorious career as the UPS-designated heir to WFB.
But there are less accessible writers out there. I was a little surprised that Joseph Schumpeter scored only 13.35, as I’d have assumed he was over 15 at a minimum.