RAAAARRRRRRR. I'll make it better.
I preface this diary by saying my handling of the English language can be perilous at times, (comma?) but the
kind of grammatical issues found by San Francisco-based
Grammarly, when studying presidential candidates' Facebook pages, are seemingly
more obvious issues.
After studying thousands of comments on those candidates’ Facebook pages, Grammarly found two overwhelming trends: Democrats use better grammar than Republicans, and generally speaking, the more popular a candidate is—regardless of party—the more likely it is that their Facebook pages will be filled with grammatical errors.
Fans of both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Carly Fiorina made an average of 6.3 grammatical mistakes per 100 words. But fans of every other Democratic candidate in the study—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former Virgina Sen. Jim Webb, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee—made fewer mistakes than that.
How about Republicans?
Commenters on the pages of the 13 Republican candidates had increasingly worse grammar, ending with real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump, whose Facebook fans had a whopping 12.6 errors per 100 words.
[bold my emphasis]
Grammarly only used the positive comments of support for each candidate and so this disqualifies famous comments like:
ﻩ. Hillary Clinton: if you like fitnes =>> bit.ly/1WHHOrh <
= full video .. 10 Min Abs Workout – At Home Abdominal and Oblique Exercises: Find out how many calories this 10 Minute Abs Workout burns [thumbs up emoticon]
Or this:
"REPUBLICAN`S" keep refusing, Hillary`s LIE`S.. to protect the American People...At Home & In Benghazi......."You Were Wrong" HILLARY CLINTON...(100 percent)..... Even Monica, can not protect, You anymore!
The—EXAMPLES are more: in the world,
of ENTHUSIASM!!!!!!!!!!!
Capitalization problems, unorthodox use of ellipsis, extra exclamation points, incorrect use of “of”: “Donald trump president of 2016… To the White House he goes!!!! Make America great again!!!”
Capitalization problems, missing comma, missing quotation marks: “Mr. Trump Remember: Whoever is trying to bring you down is already below you. I LOVE that quote!”
For me grammar is not the way of deciding someone's intelligence. It can, however, show a disjointed (frequently by rage and anger) set of thoughts that need some more time to marinate before being spewed onto a Facebook comment thread.
There's a great infographic you can share with your friends, and Grammarly's methodology, below the fold.
Here is Grammarly's methodology:
We began by taking a large sample of Facebook comments containing at least fifteen words from each candidate’s official page between April, 2015 and August, 2015. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative. Since the point of the study was to analyze the writing of each candidate’s supporters, we considered only obviously positive or neutral comments. Obviously negative or critical comments, as well as ambiguous or borderline negative comments, were disqualified.
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.
Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.