On 1/14/2016 10:38 AM, Frank wrote:
On 1/12/2016 3:11 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Uncle Monster:
You have a room-temperature national IQ and you get Sarah Palin as a
nominee and Donald Trump as a contender.

So the former "Governor" of The State Of Alaska who scares the frak out of
Progressive Liberal
Leftist Commiecrat Freaks has a low IQ? But the P.L.L.C.F. are so much
smarter than everyone
else, why are they running so scared that they viciously attack someone who
isn't that
intelligent? Won't their superior intelligence assure them of a win? O_o

I was referring to the populace's "IQ" (actually education
level/critical thinking skills)... not Sarah Palin's.


There is nothing wrong with speaking or writing at a level below the level of
your education.

Of course not! Kindergarten teachers spend the majority of their day
speaking below their level of education!

But, if you spend much time speaking to folks who "talk down"
to their students (as a necessary condition of their employment),
you learn that they tend to think everyone operates at that
reduced level of comprehension. They lose the capacity to
*offer* more information, defaulting to this dumbed down
attitude.

In fact, it is a good idea as it gets your point across to
everyone.

This is where it gets murky. How *low* do you set that threshold?
Should Little Johnny who's currently TEETHING be able to understand
your comments? Surely *he's* interested in the direction the country
would be headed under your leadership!

You should be speaking to a level that *voters* can understand.
And, "speaking" just covers your choice of words and sentence
structure. I can explain how a computer works to an 8 year old!
It will take me a lot of words and childhood analogies. But,
by the end, the little tike will understand its workings
as well as his parents or grandparents!

What;s missing in the political rhetoric is patient explanation
of the perceived problems, proposed solutions and *why* the
solution WILL address the problem. If there are pesky little
details that complicate the reality of these situations, then
it falls upon the person making the pitch to explain these,
not dismiss them as "unfortunate details".

*How* are you going to bill Mexico for The Wall? Cite some
legal precedent that the eggheads can verify. Then, explain the
significance of this to Joe Plumber in words he can understand.
If you don't have the intellectual capacity to figure out how
to relate to that wide variety of intelligence and life experiences
in your audience, then talk to the speech writers that you are
PAYING and let them figure it out for you.

If, I did, for example, most would not understand me as my education went
through grad school.

There is an easy way to analyze speech or writing through the Gunning fog index:

Most of these indices have serious drawbacks due to their simplicity.
You can write reams of prose without using a three syllable word
(i.e., driving your readability score down) and cover something complex.
Or, something trivial.

Note the Twain passage I cited in the "eReader options" thread. Technically,
it is written at a relatively low readability level. Yet, reading it
would strike many as "complex". Just look at the punctuation counts,
number of subphrases in each sentence, etc. Most readability metrics
gloss over a lot of this.

When I prepare documents for publication, I routinely check the Flesch
Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, ARI, SMOG, and Gunning Fog Index
(these figures are available from within my "word processor") while I'm
writing -- just to see if I'm getting too far afield of my target audience
(though, admittedly, my target audience tends to be fairly advanced).

Writing for a third grade level would be crippling! "See Spot run. Run
Spot, run!"