A new “study” done by the grammar app Grammarly examined the Facebook comments of the supporters of all major Presidential candidates and noticed a few startling patterns.
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According to the Washington Post, the company explained their results in a detailed blog post. Trump supporters, of which there are about 433x as many on Facebook alone, make over 4x the errors in every 100 words of commenting (as Chafee’s minions). Trump supporters are far more numerous but most grammatically challenged, racking up 12.6 boo-boos per hundred words.
Coming up in the rankings right behind Trump were fellow Republicans Rick Santorum with 11.5 grammar errors per 100 words and Marco Rubio with 8.8 mistakes per 100 words. Democrats also averaged almost ten more words per comment: 41.8 compared to 32.4 for Republicans.
The five Facebook pages with the least grammatical errors belong to the Democratic candidates. Supports of Republican Carly Fiorina and Democrat Hillary Clinton tied in the middle with 6.3 mistakes per 100 words. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative.
It ran all of the comments through its automated proofreader and had a team of humans on hand to verify and tally the errors. They then selected 180 random comments for each candidate.
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They then focused in on “black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement” while ignoring “stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers”.
