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Fade to Black takes a Critical Look at:
Presidential
Debates 2004
(Continued from previous
page)
(F2B)
-- In order to try to decipher which candidate is more intelligent we decided to calculate the average word length, unique word count and other factors of the Presidential debates.
The first thing we did was to get the complete transcripts of the three Presidential debates and isolate all the words used by George Bush and John Kerry.
Here is what we found:
During the three Presidential debates George Bush used 19,202 words consisting of 86,502 letters. John Kerry used 22016 words consisting of 97747 letters. Based on those stats the average word size George Bush used has 4.5 letters in it. Which John
Kerry's average word size consisted of 4.43 letters.
In fairness George Bush did increase his average word length count by using made up words like
"Internets" as in "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a
draft?"
Statistical Breakdown
The average word length count round goes to George Bush by a very tiny margin.
(Click to enlarge graph)
(Click to enlarge graph)
We next looked at the number of unique words each candidate used. After counting the totals George Bush used 2,391 unique words out of 19202 total words used. John Kerry on the other hand used 2,493 unique words out of 22,016 total words used. Calculating the totals 12.45% of George Bush Words were unique and 11.32% of John
Kerry's words were unique.
(Click to enlarge graph)
(Click to enlarge graph)
George Bush won this round by having a larger vocabulary.
For the final round we ran both transcripts through Microsoft Word to determine the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level determines the U.S. Grade-school level of the text. This score is calculated using a more robust calculations such as average sentence length and average number of syllables per word.
(Click to enlarge graph)
In this round John Kerry clearly wins having the score of 7.2 against George
Bush's 7.1
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As in 
commission
on Presidential Debates
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