{"id":8869,"date":"2015-10-28T07:19:15","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=8869"},"modified":"2015-10-28T07:19:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T13:19:15","slug":"david-crisp-grammar-gurus-give-democrats-higher-marks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/10\/david-crisp-grammar-gurus-give-democrats-higher-marks\/","title":{"rendered":"David Crisp: Grammar gurus give Democrats higher marks"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2016 presidential election is still very much up in the air, but when it comes to grammar, Democrats have a commanding lead.<\/p>\n

At least that\u2019s the conclusion of a new study by Grammarly<\/a>, an online grammar-checking website. Grammarly checked supportive comments on presidential candidates\u2019 Facebook pages, and concluded that Republican supporters made twice as many errors as Democratic supporters.<\/p>\n

\"Crisp\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, the worst score for a Democrat\u2014the 6.3 errors per hundred words made by Hillary Clinton supporters\u2014exactly equaled the best score for a Republican, .<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t space here to lay out all of the steps Grammarly said it took to get an accurate result. For example, it omitted comments that weren\u2019t clearly positive to guard against lingering trolls (who, as is well known, have grammar skills only slightly above those of ogres). And it didn\u2019t count errors about which reasonable grammarians might disagree, such as the use of the Oxford comma.<\/p>\n

The results were striking. The best score, 3.1 errors per 100 words in Facebook comments, was for Democrat Lincoln Chafee, who has since left the race. But he had so few supporters that his numbers might have been skewed.<\/p>\n

The worst score was by supporters of Donald Trump, who made 12.6 errors per 100 words. It didn\u2019t take long to glean a sample:<\/p>\n

\u2666 \u201cObama is a muslim, that’s why he only care about climate change.. Trump 2016!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2666 \u201cHes an idiot! Trump for President!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2666 \u201cObama and Hillary for prision\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2666 \u201cObamas a delusional Moron.\u201d<\/p>\n

And my personal favorite: \u201cThat’s why I and others created \u2018Chepo Team\u2019, the first true pro-America, libertarian comic strip.\u201d<\/p>\n

That comma floating outside the \u201cChepo Team\u201d quotation marks isn\u2019t American at all. It\u2019s pure British.<\/p>\n

As I sometimes tell composition students, our forefathers fought a long and bloody war to guarantee the right of all Americans, everywhere, to place commas and periods inside quotation marks. The assertion isn\u2019t perfectly accurate, but it gets the point across.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>So what\u2019s going on here? To the extent that \u201cRepublican\u201d equals \u201cconservative,\u201d one would expect the GOP to be a stalwart defender of English grammar. Complaints that standard English is just a way to repress lower economic classes usually come from liberals, not conservatives.<\/p>\n

I inflict English grammar every semester on college freshmen who have done me no harm, and it isn\u2019t clear to me that the grammatically challenged are any dumber or more conservative than their grammatical betters. The only clear difference is that students who read a lot tend to use better grammar than students who don\u2019t\u2014no doubt because grammar isn\u2019t so much learned as absorbed.<\/p>\n

Ben Carson, whose supporters weighed in at 6.6 on the Grammarly scale, was recently urged to read more by California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat and a wonk\u2019s wonk. After Carson said that he had not seen \u201coverwhelming evidence\u201d that humans are causing the climate to change, Brown sent him a flash drive loaded with evidence and wrote, \u201cPlease use your considerable intelligence to review this material. Climate change is much bigger than partisan politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Trump\u2019s case, his supporters\u2019 grammatical deficiencies might in part be explained by surveys that show he has twice as much support from non-college voters than from college graduates. I\u2019m not saying college graduates are smarter than non-grads, nor am I saying that they pick better presidential candidates. But if they haven\u2019t learned at least something about grammar, then college English departments all across the country are falling down on the job.<\/p>\n

Or it is possible that some of these Republican candidates aren\u2019t really conservative at all. As David Brooks recently put it, \u201cBy traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t sound much like Donald Trump, does it? He sounds most like a conservative when he talks about immigration, but he really isn\u2019t. Arguing that the United States needs to secure its borders and control immigration is conservative. Arguing that we can round up and deport 11 million people, build a wall to keep them from coming back and then somehow force Mexico to pay for it isn\u2019t conservative; it\u2019s wacky.<\/p>\n

And so down the line. Even Fiorina\u2019s supporters have trouble defending her top qualification, which is her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.<\/p>\n

Ted Cruz sounds like he would rather blow up the government than run it. Rick Santorum (second-worst in the grammar ratings) sounds more like a theocrat than a Republican. Lindsey Graham just wants to have a war, and he doesn\u2019t much seem to care against whom.<\/p>\n

Republicans could easily counter with their own list of horribles: Clinton is a liar, Sanders is a socialist, O\u2019Malley is a pipsqueak, and so on.<\/p>\n

Fine. Have at \u2019em. Just try to spell the words right.<\/p>\n

David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997. The Outpost is published every Thursday and is available for free all over Billings and in nearby communities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2016 presidential election is still very much up in the air, but when it comes to grammar, Democrats have a commanding lead. At least that\u2019s the conclusion of a new study by Grammarly, an online grammar-checking website. Grammarly checked supportive comments on presidential candidates\u2019 Facebook pages, and concluded that Republican supporters made twice as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1871],"tags":[3295,3294,3297,2853,64,1339,3292,1428,3296,3293],"class_list":["post-8869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-outpost","tag-ben-carson","tag-carly-fiorina","tag-david-brooks","tag-donald-trump","tag-facebook","tag-grammar","tag-grammarly","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-jerry-brown","tag-lincoln-chafee","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}