![]() Obama's nearly 10th-grade-level rating was the highest of any of his major speeches and well above the grade 7.4 of his 2008 "Yes, we can" victory speech, which many consider his best effort, Payack said. "New Orleans lost a third of its population it's still recovering."īut he praised Obama's phrase "oil began spewing" as active and graphic. ![]() "You shouldn't be saying that in Katrina-land," said Payack, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years." ![]() And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it is not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. Payack found these three sentences insensitive: "Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. "We can't cure cancer, but I'm comforted to know that the best researchers in the nation are devoted to finding a cure." "He's just trying to be transparent," Yaros said. Yaros disagreed, supporting the quality of the president's explanation for spelling out the efforts under way, even if they have not succeeded in ending the flow. "That's the type of phraseology that makes you aloof and out of touch." "A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary," Payack recommended. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy." He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: "That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge - a team led by Dr. Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Payack, who gave Obama a "solid B." His Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. IReporter:Obama's speech too fuzzy on detailsīut Obama's speech may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday by Paul J.J. "If you look at the entire speech, and you look at the amount of jargon, it came out to 1.5 percent," he said. At that point, BP plans to pump heavy drilling fluid into the runaway well, ending the flow. That was the term 'relief well.' He never explained that."īP is digging a relief well that is expected to intersect with the blown-out well in August. Of the 417 idea units that discussed what Obama planned to do, "I found only one idea unit that probably would be potentially confusing to a nonexpert. He then looked at how many of those idea units contained jargon - unexplained terms that the average person might not recognize - and found none in the 65 idea units that explained the problem. He divided the speech into 1,200 "idea units," each of which represents a point the president was trying to make. ![]() "It was straightforward and easy to understand," said Ron Yaros, assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, referring to the explanations of the crisis and its possible solutions. (CNN) - Language experts weighed in Thursday after poring over the nearly 2,700 words of President Obama's Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster.
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