Found a lexical comparison of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates speeches last week published at SeattlePI. I did not know there might be a way to objectively measure how easy a person is to understand. Apparently, there is a way according to Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
"…..And just for fun, we also analyzed the text with the language-assessment tools at UsingEnglish.com. Click on the names of those ratios below for definitions. Lower scores generally mean that the language is easier to understand. By those measures, one executive did noticeably better than the others. "
|
Speaker |
Steve Jobs | Bill Gates | Michael Dell |
| Avg. Words/Sentence: | 10.5 | 21.6 | 16.5 |
| Lexical Density | 16.5 | 21 | 26.3 |
| Hard Words: | 2.9 | 5.11 | 6.4 |
| Gunning Fog Index | 5.5 | 10.7 | 9.1 |
| Total Score | 35.4 | 58.41 | 58.3 |
I also looked at the Tag Clouds of all three speakers and found that Jobs talked most strongly about the iPhone and iPod while Bill Gates was more focused on devices and great hardware. Michael Dell talked the most about Online Gaming.
Steve Jobs was the easiest speaker to understand of the three while Bill Gates was the hardest to understand - if we believe these numbers.
