Matt Lauer hosted the two candidates at a forum on the military, veterans, foreign policy and being presidential. And also emails. This was a good opportunity, I felt, to compare in various highly scientific ways the wordage coming out of each candidate’s mouth.
[I wrote some thoughts earlier as a comment but have since expanded my nerdy stats a bit.]
Trump won the coin toss because he is a winner and he wins so much you’re gonna get sick of him winning, and like a true gentleman he let the lady go first. They were to have 30 minutes each on the grill, although from the time each was introduced to the final thankyou’s, Clinton was on for 24m 41s and Trump for 25m 21s.
So how was that wordage? I pasted the transcripts into Word and discovered Clinton spoke 2680 words compared to Trump’s 3227. She used slightly longer words (4.6 vs 4.3 letters per word respectively) which explains some of that difference, but taking into account the stats below I think Trump must have spoken much faster.
Interestingly, when you remove the lengthy audience questions (her 4, his 6, which both used up about 40% of the total question words), but not the answers, and remove the greetings and final thank yous, and the “as briefly as you can” sort of comments, Lauer asked 526 words of actual questions to Clinton, but 1059 words of questions — twice as many — to Trump (4.8 vs 4.6 letters per word respectively). A lot of what Lauer said to Trump was repeating or quoting what Trump has said in the past.
Put another way, Clinton spoke 5 times as many words as Lauer; Trump spoke only 3 times as many words as Lauer — Lauer hogged more of Trump’s allotted time, which is probably a good thing from Trump’s campaign’s point of view (they don’t have to hold their breath as long), although I’m sure Trump wouldn’t be happy about it, given that he has the best words.
So who really does have the best words? I plugged the cleaned-up transcripts of their responses into this readability site. Clinton’s transcript is at a grade level of 9.1, Trump’s is 6.2. Her Flesch-Kincaid Reading ease score (higher score = easier to read) is 67 (“Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.”), his is 82 (“Easy to read. Conversational English for consumers.” — nope, no Plain English for the Orange One.)
Clinton used 18 words with more than 4 syllables, Trump managed 10. Clinton used 16 words with more than 12 letters, Trump used 6. Her longest words (by syllable) were responsibility and counterterrorism. His were…
… wait for it…
businesspeople and administration.
What could it all mean, other than my having too much time on my hands? One thing’s for sure, Trump needs to work on using more than five tremendous’s per 25 minutes to boost his average word length and apparent literacy.