Study: Democrats are much better at grammar than Republicans


Presidential elections become more digitally oriented every year, with debates and conversations about the 2016 campaign occurring on almost every social media platform. As such, it's inevitable that some supporters will happen to be better spoken than others. To find out which candidate has the most grammatically correct supporters, the app Grammarly conducted a study on Democratic and Republican candidates' Facebook pages — and it turns out that Republican commenters get the red squiggly underline more than twice as often as Democrats do.
Grammarly sampled comments of 15 or more words on candidates' official Facebook pages between April and August 2015. The team then looked specifically at positive or neutral comments and ran grammar tests using both Grammarly and live proofreaders. For the purpose of the study, Grammarly only counted misspellings, wrong or missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement, letting slang words, serial commas, and miswritten numerals slide.
With that, the results were in: Democrats made 4.2 mistakes per 100 words, while Republicans, at 8.7, made over double that. What's more, Lincoln Chafee, an underdog in the Democratic primary, had the most grammatically knowledgeable fans — they only made 3.1 mistakes for every 100 words. Hillary Clinton had the least grammatically correct supporters of all of the Democratic candidates, with commenters clocking 6.3 mistakes per 100 words — the same number as the best-spoken Republican supporters, who rallied in a grammatically correct fashion behind Carly Fiorina.
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But not everyone can be winners: Way down at the bottom of the list was Donald Trump, whose supporters made a whopping 12.6 errors for every 100 words they wrote.
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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.
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