LOL: Congress Is Getting Stupider, According to Lexical Analysis

If you've ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you're not wrong. The nation's lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.

LOL: Congress Is Getting Stupider, According to Lexical Analysis 02272011capitol

We fail English? That's unpossible.

An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale—best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software—reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.

Still, it's not entirely a measurement of innate dumbness. Maybe, the Sunlight report argues, the drop in Congressional perspicacity could be attributed to more floor speeches being delivered in campaign-speak and Internet-friendly sound bites:

http://dcist.com/2012/05/congress_is_getting_stupider_accord.php

LOL: Congress Is Getting Stupider, According to Lexical Analysis

LOL: Congress Is Getting Stupider, According to Lexical Analysis

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