Trump First in the Polls, But His Supporters Are Last in Grammar
What? (Photo: Getty Images)
Forget you are what you eat. When it comes to election season, you are what you speak.
Or type, rather.
A new study by the proofreading app Grammarly shows that grammar skills vary widely among the supporters of the different presidential candidates.
The study involved scanning comments made by supporters on the 19 presidential candidates’ Facebook pages. “Whoever your pick for POTUS, one thing’s certain — political topics inspire passionate discussions,” says a Grammarly blog post. “With a light heart and heavy-hitting algorithms, we visited each candidate’s official Facebook page and looked at the comments there to see how well their supporters handle themselves when they communicate their ideas in writing.”
The findings: While Republican supporters generally make more mistakes and use fewer words than Democratic supporters, one specific group needs the most help in the grammar department: Trump supporters. They made 12.6 mistakes for every 100 words written.
The study also found that supporters of Republican presidential candidates made more than twice as many errors, on average — at 8.7 mistakes for every 100 words — than supporters of Democrats, who made 4.2 mistakes for every 100 words.
Among the Democratic candidates: While Lincoln Chaffee may be trailing in the polls, his supporters made the fewest mistakes of any candidate, Democrat or Republican, with only 3.1 mistakes per 100 words.
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s supporters might want to get out their old copies of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, as they made the most mistakes (6.3 per 100 words) of any of the Democratic candidates’ supporters.
Carly Fiorina may have some trouble with the truth, but her supporters seem to have a better grasp of the English language than those of her competition. Fiorina’s Facebook commenters had the fewest number of errors in the GOP field, with 6.3 mistakes for every 100 words. (Interesting to note: Both Clinton and Fiorina supporters had the same error rate.)
Related: Megyn Kelly’s Response to Donald Trump Is a Master Class in Handling Haters
While Trump supporters may want to Make American Great Again, they might want to make their grammar skills great again, too. Errors made by Trump supporters and commenters included sentence fragments…
“The only presidential candidate that’s not owned by a donor and the only one that speaks the TRUTH, the man of honor that works for America without the need for a paycheck, Donald J. Trump.”
… As well as capitalization problems, unorthodox use of ellipsis, extra exclamation points, incorrect use of “of”…
“Donald trump president of 2016… To the White House he goes!!!! Make America great again!!!”
… And egregious misuse of the beloved em dash by the candidate himself:
“Crooked @club4growth has given up advertising in Iowa on me—remember they wanted my million dollars—I said no—total frauds!”
While psychologists have yet to reach a unanimous agreement regarding how the language acquisition process works, many believe that language is developed primary through imitation. This may suggest that the various candidates’ supporters (though already verbal and of speaking age) could be mimicking and replicating one another’s linguistic tics.
Related: #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult: Twitter’s (Hilarious) Response to Donald Trump’s Megyn Kelly Comment
As one 1989 study on language acquisition stated: “In most behavioral domains, competence is expected to increase over development, whether gradually or in stages.”
Alas, it seems that for some political supporters, mastery of the English language has peaked at a sub-par level.
Here’s the full infographic from Grammarly:
