USA Today tried to start a squabble on the top of Wednesday’s front page with the headline “Grammar slammers: Dems crush GOP.” Paul Singer’s article began: “Yes, these are fighting words, but here goes: Republicans mangle the English language at twice the rate of Democrats.”
Here’s the interesting part: the ratings were calculated by measuring positive comments – and filtering the negative ones out. Then they took a random sample of comments, looking for errors like bad punctuation or misspellings:
According to a new study by the grammar-checking app Grammarly, supporters commenting on Democratic candidates’ Facebook pages made an average of 4.2 mistakes per 100 words compared to 8.7 mistakes for supporters of Republican candidates. The Democratic supporters also showed a larger vocabulary, using on average 300 unique words per 1,000 words, while Republicans used only 245.
The trend is starker when broken out by candidate: The five Democratic candidates — Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton — all get better Facebook grammar scores (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina, whose supporters posted the best grammar scores of any GOP candidate, tying her with Clinton.
Of the entire field, Chafee supporters are most grammatical (while also being rarest), making 3.1 errors per hundred words. Trump supporters are far more numerous but most grammatically challenged, racking up 12.6 boo-boos per hundred words. Fiorina and Clinton meet in the middle at 6.3.
Talk about liberal media outlets looking for a study to confirm their biases! “Republicans are much dumber than Democrats” is a natural. But the website Grammarist.com suggests that Grammarly "doesn't work" as a Grammar app, so perhaps USA Today should issue a retraction or try to avoid this party trick in the future. Here’s how Grammarly failed the test, in brief:
Obvious spelling errors
I definately love cats.
-1. Grammarly makes no corrections.
Kittens are the cuetest.
+1. Grammarly correctly catches the spelling error.
-1. Grammarly incorrectly suggests changing are to is.
I especially like the mischievious ones.
-1. Grammarly instructs us to review this sentence for sentence fragments, but we have no idea why.
-1. No correction of “mischievious.”
Less obvious spelling errors
I got a letter form my girlfriend.
-1. No corrections.
And on it goes. Their conclusion?
Grammarly doesn’t work. As the above results show, Grammarly did not catch several of our intentional grammar and spelling errors, it had nothing to say about any of our intentionally misused words, and it makes recommendations based on 19th-century grammar superstitions.
