Donald Trump's speeches are at a fourth-grade level, study finds

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published 21 October 2015

The secret to a successful presidential campaign might lie on the simplicity of speech. Case in point: Donald Trump. Trump has been leading in the polls for months now and, according to a Flesch-Kincaid readability test that ranks speech by grade level, he's been making speeches at a fourth-grade level. The two candidates speaking at the highest grade levels — Mike Huckabee and Jim Gilmore — are struggling in the polls. The Boston Globe reports:

The Republican candidates — like Trump — who are speaking at a level easily understood by people at the lower end of the education spectrum are outperforming their highfalutin opponents in the polls. Simpler language resonates with a broader swath of voters in an era of 140-character Twitter tweets and 10-second television sound bites, say specialists on political speech. [The Boston Globe]