Congressman Mick Mulvaney — He Understands the Elements of Style

 

When we say that Congressman Mulvaney understands “The Elements of Style,” we don’t mean he’s a fashion icon on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.

Mick Mulvaney is a smart guy. He’s a REALLY smart guy. He’s also smart enough to know not to speak above people when he wants to get his points across, so when he was chastised for receiving the lowest grade-level score among congressional members’ speaking styles, he wore it as a badge of honor. “I’m extraordinarily proud of the fact that I was last on that list,” he told CRESCENT.

We conclude our feature on Congressman Mick Mulvaney by discussing the Sunlight Foundation, Flesch-Kincaid tests, Strunk & White, and the most important classes you can take in school.

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Let’s talk about the folks at the Sunlight Foundation. 

Yeah.

A few months ago, they published results of their study of congressional speaking styles and named you as having the lowest score — saying that your floor speeches were roughly at an eight-grade level because you don’t use $.50 words when a $.05 word will work just as well.  With your undergraduate degree from Georgetown, your JD from Chapel Hill, and a little bit of time at the Harvard Business School, what do you say to your critics?

I will send you the formal response that we created in this office…I created, I wrote it myself.  It is a 102-word sentence and it grades out at the 30th grade level under the Flesch-Kincaid test that the Sunlight Foundation ran through it.  What I told people generally is that nobody seriously equates long sentence length and big words with intelligence.  It is much more important to actually listen to what people have to say, and I think it’s been a fun study.  It’s been a little discouraging how much attention we get over that when we don’t nearly the same amount of attention, for example, over the “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation that I wrote to balance the budget.  And it’s something like this that really does represent the triumph of form over substance, but it’s been fun and a great opportunity for me to remind folks that…and I tell this to the… Kids ask me this when I go speak at schools…”What’s the most important class?”  I always tell them “English.”  English grammar and possibly public speaking are the most important classes you can take in your whole life because if you cannot read, write, understand, and speak the language, it’ll never make any difference how smart you are because no one will ever know.  You have to be able to articulate your thoughts, to put your thoughts in a form that you can explain and talk about with other people.  I’m extraordinarily proud of the fact that I was last on that list.  I consider it to be first on that list, and I’ve been overwhelmed with the number of people who have written me and said… By the way, that test is actually designed to try and get that number down.  The goal is to try and have that number be as low as possible so that you are easily understandable.  It’s (the Flesch-Kincaid test) actually offered, by the way, on Microsoft Word.  You can go home today, type something up on your Microsoft Word.  Drop down under Tools is a thing called “Readability” for the Flesch-Kincaid test depending on which format, what version of Microsoft Word you have and you can filter your work through that same test that they use at the Sunlight Foundation.  The reason they do that is just as fascinating.  Microsoft, as a corporation, makes their lawyers put their contracts through the test in order to keep the number as low as possible because they say lawyers, especially, tend to write in sentences that only other lawyers can understand.  And that a good contract is a contract that everybody can understand so that’s why it is hardwired into the Microsoft Word program because the Microsoft attorneys have to use it all the time.  I know that because my roommate from college is one of the Microsoft lawyers who wrote me a great essay about that article when it came out.  But I will send you the 102…it’s great.  But again, you know it goes back…we started the conversation…we’ll end it where we started it.  I got in politics through writing.  I got in through writing and I was the son of a grammar teacher.  My dad used to teach high school English.  My favorite class, the one teacher that…everyone always has a teacher they always remember, was my eighth grade grammar teacher.  My wife and I still diagram sentences at the dinner table at night and my children will confirm that for you.  I love the English language and I’ve always prided myself on my writing and you know, as a journalist, writing a short sentence and a short paragraph and short column is much harder than writing a long sentence.

Twitter is one of the best things to happen to writing in a long time.  To have to put a thought in 140 characters and no more…

I’m going to misattribute this, but there is a Founding Father, might have been John Adams, who closed one of his famous letters…it might have made into the movie or the book…he closed a letter…it may have been to Jefferson, he says, “I apologize for writing such a long letter.  I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.

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AFTERWORD: Congressman Mulvaney shared his official statement about the Sunlight Foundation rating with us. We wanted to pass it along to you.

“In an analytical algorithmic system, such as the Flesch-Kincaid Test employed by the Sunlight Foundation in the current study and as originally reported by NPR, which attempts to establish a correlation between intellect and such simplistic metrics as length of sentence and polysyllabic word choice, it should not strike one as unanticipated that it is the person who has a thesaurus within easy reach, is afforded an unlimited supply of commas, possesses a surplusage of time, and is somehow granted unfettered access to a microphone, who invariably will be acknowledged as the smartest person in the room.

It seems that a better measure may well be whether the person actually has something intelligent to say.”

For anybody keeping score, that comment scores at a 29th grade level.  (For fun:  http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php).

Hope all is well.

MM

P.S. Feel free to forward to other people whom you believe may know what a “Strunk & White” is.

For Part 1, Click HERE. For Part 2, Click HERE. For Part 3, Click HERE.

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