Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster Tuesday night was written at a 10th-grade level, which, according to analysts, may have gone over the heads of many in his audience...

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence "added some difficulty for his target audience," Payack said.

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. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy."

Rush Limbaugh already hit it on the head back in February:

Obama is the Professor in Rodney Dangerfield’s Film “Back to School”
February 12, 2010
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021210/content/01125109.guest.html

But during this business class, this stuffy, arrogant, condescending professor is describing on the chalkboard how business works and how you go get money to start it and the capital here and capital there, and after he finishes, “Any questions, class?” And Rodney Dangerfield puts his hands up and says, “You left a whole lot of stuff out here.” “You want to enlighten us, sir?” “Well, yeah, before you can do any of that, you gotta go talk to the people who are going to take your trash away and if you think that’s easy, you gotta be prepared to do some stuff under the line and you gotta be able to go behind closed doors because if you don’t get those people on your side your business is never going to open.” And he says, “We don’t run businesses in our classroom like yours.” He just kept making mincemeat out of the professor because the professor — it’s great — it’s funny as hell because it was a clear illustration, even though it’s a movie, of somebody in the business world telling a professor who drives his cheap, little, tiny MG around smoking his pipe, who doesn’t have the foggiest idea how business works, he’s teaching it, versus a guy who’s in the business world, is a multi, multimillionaire success at it. And of course the professor tells the businessman he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And this is what we face now. Obama is that professor. When you read this interview at Bloomberg, it’s dangerous, it is really dangerous. The people that elected this guy owe us big time.

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