Sarah Palin Praised For Writing At Eighth-Grade Level

After scanning pounds of emails Sarah Palin wrote during her brief tenure as governor of Alaska, journalists failed to find anything more interesting than a penchant for using the word “flippin.'” In light of this absence of relevant information, reporters are now analyzing not what she says, but how she says it.

AOL Wired News asked two writing analysts to look over 60 randomly selected messages that were at least one paragraph long. After applying the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, they both determined that she writes emails at about an eighth-grade level, which is supposedly excellent for a corporate executive.

John Katzman, CEO of 2tor says he was disappointed by his findings:

“I’m a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate … However, the emails say something else. Ms. Palin writes emails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5. If she were a student and showing me her work, I’d say ‘It’s fine, clear writing.”

Paul J.J. Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, added, “She’s very concise. She gives clear orders. Her sentences and punctuations are logical. She has much more of a disciplined mind than she’s given credit for.” The analysts said that Palin’s emails can’t really be compared to other famous speeches from American history, yet they went ahead and declared that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a 9.1 and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was an 8.8. So now that it’s been proven that Palin can communicate in writing about as well as someone who never went to high school, we should all be comfortable letting her lead the country.

Though, there is some other information revealed by the emails that may make you hesitant about giving her the power to put her horrible, if adequately-articulated, ideas into action:

“Given her portrayal of herself as very much an Alaskan I had expected to find a lot of ‘Alaskanisms’ in her emails,” said University of Alaska, Anchorage English Professor David Bowie. “But there were actually very few.” The one regionalism Bowie noticed that popped up was Palin’s use of the word “outside” for things beyond Alaska’s borders.

Okay, that’s going to take a while to sink in. Not the part about Palin turning up the folksy Alaskan charm when it suits her; We’ve always suspected that. More importantly, when did David Bowie start teaching at the University of Alaska, and why wasn’t this noted in the admissions brochure?!

Sarah Palin’s Emails Written At 8th Grade Level — Better Than Some CEOs [AOL]

Earlier: Sarah Palin’s Emails By The Numbers
Holy Flippin’ Crap: What We Learned From Sarah Palin’s Emails