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I've tried to stay away from two things this month: Anthony Weiner's wiener, and Sarah Palin's emails. Despite fifteen months of job growth out of the last seventeen and nearly two million jobs created since 2009, the economy is still in rough shape. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue. The "no-fly zone" in Libya is an illegal and expanding war. Secret drone strikes escalate in Pakistan and Yemen. Republican obstruction has slowed the confirmation process so much that people in both parties are beginning to believe that confirmations of judges and cabinet positions may actually stop entirely.
And those are just a few if the issues the beltway media ignores in favor of salacious and entertaining sex scandals.
Count this as a failure on my part, try as I might I was finally sucked into the Palin email story.: a superficial yet still intriguing AOL test of Sarah Palin's literacy.
According to a large sample of random emails from the massive document dump last Friday, Palin writes at a level that students halfway through ninth grade should be able to easily understand, according to the Flesch-Kincaid test.
There are a few points worth considering with tests like this.
First, the Flesch-Kincaid test doesn't measure coherency, grammar, or even the ability to finish a complete thought. It is a rigid mathematical equation consisting of a few magic constants mixed with total words, sentences, and the number of syllables in a given text. Writing at an eighth grade level doesn't necessarily mean one could even pass eighth grade English, for instance. Nor does this test account for the ability of some people to write well when they have time to consider their thoughts, that then struggle while speaking spontaneously.
Second, what this test shows is that an eighth grader should be able to read and understand the emails that Sarah Palin wrote while serving as Alaska's Governor.
To be fair to others, Palin's result of 8.5 is an average of a significant number of random samples. Many speeches and stories can vary on the Flesch-Kincard test. An op-ed that Palin wrote for the Washington Post on climate science in December of 2009 was written at a 14.34 grade level and scored a 31.85 on the reading ease level, which is "best understood by university graduates".
A select portion of Palin's 2008 speech at the Republican National Convention (the first 950 words) was written at a grade level of 8.39 and reading ease level of 68, which should be "easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students".
Both of those examples make sense given their context and their respective audiences.
I suppose the lesson is that even though Sarah Palin is almost certainly an idiot, like most people she can seem far more intelligent – or perhaps actually be more intelligent – if she takes the time to think before she speaks. Or in this case, before she writes.
As Michael McLaughlin did in the story linked above, in all fairness I ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on my latest story and found the following:
GOP false flag operation in Wisconsin gets official party endorsement
Grade Level: 17.70
Reading Ease Level: 29.04
The takeaway: Sarah Palin is perfectly capable of communicating like a thoughtful adult when she chooses to, or has the time to try. But for whatever reason she had no problem talking to public servants in the Alaska state government as though they were a bunch of 15-year-olds.
