Communication is not 'talking down' to people

Communication is the key to success. Whether you are selling yourself, your product or your idea to an individual or a mass audience, in America or anywhere else, and Donald Trump gets it better than anyone in the 2016 race to the White House. More than thirty years ago, a senior systems analyst at a leading computer company told me that aside from their well-made products, the main marketing reason for their success was that all their technical manuals and literature were written at the eighth grade reading level, which during the 1980's was the median of the general public's educational bell curve. This past March, a team from Carnegie-Mellon University published research and analysis of speeches by current and past presidential candidates and found Donald Trump's grammatical skills, whether by design or limitation, to be just below the sixth grade level, while his vocabulary skills were at Grade 7. Now when you take into consideration the rapid decline of the average American's attention span--which appears to now be 140 characters or less--divided by their greatly diminished comprehension levels since the '80's, then factor in their reduced accumulation of useful common knowledge on just about every topic, you have a good representation of the American target audience. Along comes Donald Trump, ceaselessly repeating his vaguely detailed talking points over and over, more than Marco Rubio ever thought of doing. And he does it in that whining, 'squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease' infantile fashion which has become the favored modus operandi of a large segment of American society. In short, IT WORKS! Remember, he is not courting the affluent upper 10%. He's corralling the middle class and the poor who feel short-changed by the parties and powerbrokers and he has reached a much a broader audience than all the media's intellectual political pundits combined. K.J. Dolney Columbia, SC

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