I spent about a year as a tutor for kids between 5 and 13; all subjects, but mainly English. What always struck me about their writing was the way they'd deploy facts. Where older kids and adults will just mention a statistic or tidbit once, younger kids will keep circling around it, repeating it again and again from slightly different angles and approaches. I assume developmental psychologists actually have a term for this. I don't. But I notice the same sort of hyperfactuality in Bush's speeches. Take this paragraph from his Labor Day address:
Today, on Labor Day, we honor those who work, and we honor those who work because, in so doing, we recognize that one of the reasons why we're the economic leader in the world is because of our work force. And the fundamental question facing the country is, how do we continue to be the economic leader in the world? What do we do to make sure that, when people look around the world next year, and 10 years from now, they say, the United States is still the most powerful economy in the world? I think that's an important goal to have, because when we're the most powerful economy in the world, it means our people benefit. It means there's job opportunities. That's what we want. We want people working. We want people to realize their dreams.
There are two main pieces of information in there: First, that our economy is strong because of our workforce, and second, that the strength of our economy is important. By my count, he says the second fact seven different times, in seven different ways. He even uses the sixth-grader's trope of "I think that's an important..."
As you get older, you know what's important or not, and you know that your relative belief in the importance of an issue is rather immaterial. So you either simply assert something's relevance or you construct an argument for it. The importance of the economy, for instance, is the sort of thing you'd just assume others understood and, if you didn't, you'd prove through a couple statistics. When you're young, though, you're neither sure of your judgments on how much something matters nor able to effectively argue the case. So you simply say that you think it matters, and hope that its importance to you will make it important to others. It's a coping tactic that relies on the self-absorption of youth, when what's important to you is, at least in your family, important to others.
I don't want to belabor this point, but it's, uh, important. This speech looks like it was either crafted or delivered by a sixth grader. There's something wrong with it; it's not how adults speak. I don't know if Bush's writers have decided their target audience is 10, or his on-the-fly translations of text-to-speech are dumbing-down the address, but the total effect is very, very weird.
