Looks like some Donald Trump supporters won’t be winning any spelling bees any time soon.
In an analysis of posts from the Facebook pages of U.S. presidential hopefuls, supporters of Donald Trump fared the worst when it came to writing skills.
Online forums allow just about anyone to offer up their two cents, for better or for worse. Grammarly, an online automated proofreader, decided to test a random sample of Facebook posts for errors.
A large sample of comments were collected between April and August 2015. The posts were narrowed down to those considered positive or neutral posts — any negative or critical posts were excluded — and had to contain at least 15 words. Finally, 180 randomly selected posts from the narrowed down sample from each candidate’s page was tested.
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In all, five Democrat and 14 Republican candidate’s pages were tested. An average, posts on Republican pages had more than double the number of mistakes than on Democrat pages, with an average of 8.7 mistakes per 100 words versus 4.2 per mistakes per 100 words for Democrat supporters’ posts.
When listed individually, supporters of the five Democratic candidates were found to have the best grammar and spelling, followed by the 14 Republican supporter’s posts.
Posts for Trump placed at the bottom of the list, with an average of 12.6 errors per 100 words.
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Comments for Carly Fiorina fared the best of all Republican candidates, with an average of 6.3 errors per 100 words. That tied with the number of errors found in posts for Hillary Clinton, who placed at the bottom of the list of Democrats.
At the top of the list were posts for Democratic candidate Lincoln Chaffe with 3.1 mistakes per 100 words.
Democratic supporters also wrote more words on average per post, at 41.8 versus the Republican supporters’ 32.4, and wrote more unique words, at 300 versus 245 per 1,000 words.
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The comments were first analyzed using Grammerly’s online proofreader, and then verified and tallied by a team of proofreaders.
Only “black-and-white mistakes” were counted, such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement.
“We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.”
The final numbers were calculated by dividing the comments’ total word counts by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.
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