Oct 14, 2014 2 min read

The Gettysburg Address contains only 272 words. And, yet, it is almost certainly the greatest of all presidential speeches and one of the supreme monuments of oratory in the world’s history. Whole books, all vastly exceeding the length of the speech itself, were dedicated to it.

In the decades before Abraham Lincoln became president, his predecessors were not unknown to give speeches that would clock in at about the length of a typical movie. William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after he delivered a three-hour inaugural address and expired a month later.

Is a single line of it memorable or frequently quoted? Nope. The same goes for much of what Harrison’s predecessors had to say in their long-winded orations. Sometimes length and verbosity do not greatness make.

That was brought home by a study recently carried out by the website Vocativ.com, which used a reading comprehension algorithm to look at how word usage and speech patterns changed over the last two centuries in presidential speeches. Perhaps not surprisingly, the relative sophistication of the speeches declined – the addresses given by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would mostly be comprehensible in today’s world only to audiences holding a graduate degree. Over the last 50 years or so, they have dipped to the point where they can be comprehended by someone with reading skills in roughly the range of a middle school student.

A sign our discourse was leeched of elegance and made trivial?

Maybe, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, pointed out it’s a sign of our country’s increasing democratization, and how presidents now have to speak to a far broader constituency than the gentry our Founding Fathers tailored their discourse to. Simplicity and clarity carry the day over verbal somersaults.

In this case, dumber is indeed better.