Grammarly, a web service that provides proofreading and grammar checking, posted an interesting entry on its blog today. The company analyzed Facebook comments on each presidential candidate's Facebook page, eliminating negative comments to gather a data set only of the candidate's supporters. Then,
We then randomly selected at least 180 of these positive and neutral comments (~6,000 words) to analyze for each candidate. Using Grammarly, we identified the errors in the comments, which were then verified and tallied by a team of live proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.
The team also analyzed the words used by commenters to determine their range of vocabulary. All of the data was massaged and condensed into the following infographic.
Proper grammar and correct spelling aren't necessarily indicators of intelligence, of course; there are very bright people with dyslexia or other conditions which make both of those language skills challenging. However, such people are the exception rather than the rule, so it would be fair to make a correlation, in general, between intelligence and/or education and the language errors and vocabulary usage of the candidates' supporters.
In which case, it would seem we Democrats are pretty smart cookies and reasonably well educated...and the poor Trumpers are still trying to master the alphabet blocks for infants.