Trump’s 3rd Debate Answers Below 6th Grade Level

A simple analysis of the Full Transcript of the 3rd and final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton yields some stark differences between the quality of their speech. Donald Trump’s averaged a 4.52 on the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, which approximates how difficult a piece of text is to read relative to student grade levels. Across the board, Hillary’s reading level of difficulty was higher than Trump’s – from complex sentences to multi-syllabic words. Even Wallace, who had shorter questions, scored higher than Trump.

Trump
Number of characters (without spaces)	26,740.00
Number of words	6,442.00
Number of sentences	721.00
Average number of characters per word	4.15
Average number of syllables per word	1.41
Average number of words per sentence	8.93
Gunning Fog index	6.26
Coleman Liau index	5.29
Flesch Kincaid Grade level	4.52
ARI (Automated Readability Index)	2.59
SMOG	7.78
Flesch Reading Ease	78.60

Clinton
Number of characters (without spaces)	29,314.00
Number of words	6,713.00
Number of sentences	502.00
Average number of characters per word	4.37
Average number of syllables per word	1.47
Average number of words per sentence	13.37
Gunning Fog index	9.22
Coleman Liau index	7.68
Flesch Kincaid Grade level	6.95
ARI (Automated Readability Index)	5.82
SMOG	9.83
Flesch Reading Ease	69.08

Wallace
Number of characters (without spaces)	12,442.00
Number of words	2,858.00
Number of sentences	337.00
Average number of characters per word	4.35
Average number of syllables per word	1.50
Average number of words per sentence	8.48
Gunning Fog index	7.27
Coleman Liau index	6.30
Flesch Kincaid Grade level	5.46
ARI (Automated Readability Index)	3.31
SMOG	8.41
Flesch Reading Ease	71.00