Steve Jobs speaks more clearly than Bill Gates
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made great keynote speeches almost simultaneously last week. Transcripts of these speeches are published on the Internet: both Gates 'speech and Jobs' speech .
Technophile linguists decided to conduct an experiment and pass both texts through a tag generator . This is a program that displays on the screen a list of the most frequently used words from the text, while the words have different sizes, depending on their frequency. To make the analysis even more complete, we also studied the speech of Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell.
After that, the texts were passed through the semantic analysis program UsingEnglish.com, which determines the key parameters of texts: average number of words in a sentence, lexical density, share of difficult words and unreadability index ((average number of words in a sentence + percentage of words with three or more syllables) × 0.4). The smaller each of these parameters - the more understandable and accessible the text is. For example, the NY Times newspaper has an unreadability index of about 11.
The results of the experiment show a dramatic difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Unlike Bill Gates, the head of Apple speaks as short sentences as possible, simple phrases and clear words. Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo 2007 Average words per sentence: 10.5 Lexical density:
16.5%
Difficult words: 2.9%
Unreadableness index: 5.5
Video | Text
Bill Gates, Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Average words per sentence: 21.6
Lexical density: 21.0%
Difficult words: 5.11% Unreadableness
index: 10.7
Videos | Text
Michael Dell, Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Average words per sentence: 16.5
Lexical density: 26.3%
Difficult words: 6.4%
Unreadability index: 9.1
Video | Text
Technophile linguists decided to conduct an experiment and pass both texts through a tag generator . This is a program that displays on the screen a list of the most frequently used words from the text, while the words have different sizes, depending on their frequency. To make the analysis even more complete, we also studied the speech of Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell.
After that, the texts were passed through the semantic analysis program UsingEnglish.com, which determines the key parameters of texts: average number of words in a sentence, lexical density, share of difficult words and unreadability index ((average number of words in a sentence + percentage of words with three or more syllables) × 0.4). The smaller each of these parameters - the more understandable and accessible the text is. For example, the NY Times newspaper has an unreadability index of about 11.
The results of the experiment show a dramatic difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Unlike Bill Gates, the head of Apple speaks as short sentences as possible, simple phrases and clear words. Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo 2007 Average words per sentence: 10.5 Lexical density:
16.5%
Difficult words: 2.9%
Unreadableness index: 5.5
Video | Text
Bill Gates, Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Average words per sentence: 21.6
Lexical density: 21.0%
Difficult words: 5.11% Unreadableness
index: 10.7
Videos | Text
Michael Dell, Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Average words per sentence: 16.5
Lexical density: 26.3%
Difficult words: 6.4%
Unreadability index: 9.1
Video | Text