Hillary Clinton’s Acceptance Speech As Seen By The Algorithms

Last week, we ran a software analysis on clarity of speech and word usage for Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Now, it’s Hillary’s turn. VisibleThread, a firm that analyzes documents much like tools that analyze data, using software to test and audit written content for risk and content quality, generously offered to run the speeches through its software to give us a better look at clarity and theme.

It turns out that for all of her super-intellect, Hillary speaks in simple terms. Compared with Donald Trump’s 8th grade comprehension level on his speech, Hillary spoke at a 5th grade education level. Machine translation? She spoke in shorter, simpler sentences with considerably less passive voice. By VisibleThread’s metric, Clinton’s language was 13% clearer and more direct than Trump’s. That said, both speeches tested as widely accessible to an adult audience.