100 YEARS OLD AND STILL A MAN OF MANY WORDS...
BEFORE I leave my analysis of the main party manifestos, I feel it both necessary and potentially helpful to voters to say a little more about their verbal content.
The most commonly used word in all of the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem manifestos is “the” with “and” in second place and “to” in third. The next six most used words for the Conservatives are “we”, “of”, “will”, “in”, “a” and “for”, all of which also feature among the top 10 of the other parties.
While the Conservatives have “that” in 10th place, and “that” also completes the Lib Dem top 10, the same word is replaced by “labour” in Labour’s top ten. Apart from that, it is reassuring to see such agreement among the leading parties.
Interestingly, while Labour mentions “labour” no fewer than 337 times, the Conservative manifesto has only 61 mentions of “conservative” which is six fewer than the number of times the Labour manifesto includes “conservative”. By comparison, the Conservatives say “labour” only three times. Neither of them mentions “Lib Dem” or “liberal” at all, compared with 98 utterances of “liberal” in the Lib Dem manifesto.
Most significant of all, however, is the Fog Index of all three manifestos. This is a measure developed by Robert Gunning to measure the obscurity of language used in any text.
To calculate the Fog Index of a piece of writing, you add the average number of words per sentence and the average number per hundred words of those with three syllables or more. You then multiply the result by 0.4 to get a figure indicating ease of readability.
A Fog Index of 10 or less will be readable by almost anyone; 15 or more suggests a university level of education and around 20 is only achieved by the sort of writer who takes a pride in his complexity.
The Fog Index of the Bible is about 6 or 7; best-selling novels tend to register around 8; some academic papers, wallowing in their own unintelligibility, obscurantism and sesquipedalianism, register scores above 20. The average Beachcomber column scores around 12 or 13; it would be lower if I didn’t indulge my love of semi-colons so much.
By comparison, the Conservative manifesto has a Fog Index of 15.8, Labour’s is 15.3, but the Lib Dem manifesto scores a very readable 12.3 which is much the same as my own and suggests that their prospects could be improved by a more suitable election slogan. “Vote Lib Dem: we use short words and short sentences,” would surely attract votes.
Finally, I must apologise for writing so much this week about the forthcoming election. This is contrary to my usual policy of avoiding anything popular, trendy or likely to be covered in the rest of the Daily Express.
I therefore now make an unequivocal pledge not even to mention the election again until it is all over. Unless circumstances change, or I change my mind, or I decide it’s time to make a U-turn or I redefine “unequivocal pledge” as meaning “vague intention”.