Hilary LaConte's Word Cloud. Or, Foggy Weather

We've already puzzled over the meaning of Hilary LaConte's bizarre advertisement. LaConte, is the odds-on favorite win the school board race. Only a very confident candidate could publish an ad that strange without fear of upsetting her apple-cart.

We wondered whether it was just us; it should be apparent by now that the Insider has a severe intellect deficiency. We ran Hilary's text through several on-line calculator tools that compute the Gunning-Fog Index. Roughly, the Fog Index is a measure of the readability of writing. The higher the number, the longer the sentences in the text. A larger percentage of "hard" words also produce a higher score. (Disclaimer: Don't email us that we are idiots for using this. Tell us something we don't know. Its virtue is that it's simple and its numerical value indicates more or less the years of education required to get a handle on the text.) Depending on the tool used, Hilary's ad weighed in at 13.5 to 15, meaning that she used words and sentence length targeted at the sophomore to junior in College level. She sure is smart.

(For your information, the preceding two paragraphs have a Fog index of from 10 to 12, which is about the best we can do for intelligent writing on a good day, with a stiff tailwind. Maybe high school junior, give or take a year.)

Another tool which you sometimes see on websites is the "Word Cloud". We won't try to explain it fully, but it gathers up all but the most common words in one's writing and displays the ones used most often in a larger font, for more emphasis. It makes a pretty picture. Hilary's "Word Cloud" is shown at the head of this article.

If you read the word cloud, you stand as good a chance of understanding her as if you read her own writing. The Insider has to admit a preference for the poetry and cadence of LaConte's writing: "The issue for future study and conversation revolves around the impact of inter-district transfer students." And, "I look forward to analyzing the finer points of these and other issues through on-going conversations with our community."

And so do we.