What’s (Y)Our Level of Formal Education? With Poll, Naturally.

There’s a good diary on the rec list right now, wherein I commented the following:

I too am a hyper-educated person who on a regular basis must communicate with people who are not.

That got me thinking. (I have that bad habit.)  See, the other day I posted a diary about our political identification.  And — shock! — we at the Daily Kos are not representative of the US at large. But we are fairly representative of the Democratic Party on the whole. Just a little more lefty.  So, right, my comment got me thinking:

How representative are we of the US in formal educational levels? 

This question of mine has to do with how we, as Democrats, communicate with and to the American people.  As mentioned, I am hyper-educated, and my job (lawyer) requires that I communicate with people who are not necessarily.  In fact, to do my job well, to communicate and persuade, I must be a wordsmith, a crafter of words, spoken and written. I must be technically proficient when communicating with my peers and forming legal arguments, but I also must roughly translate arcane legalese into the common tongue.

And as I understand it, my civic duty requires I do the same kinda thing with my fellow citizens. That is why, as much as John Kerry spoke to me, the thing I love about Democrats like Biden and Walz is they speak to the American people in a way the American people speak to and with each other. [Politicians Clinton, Obama and perhaps Buttigieg have that once-in-a-generation ability to sometimes speak all fancy, but in a folksy, accessible kinda way].  

It’s the same way in which I try to speak to most people; that is, I try to use the Anglo-Saxon/vulgarized Anglo-French word or phrasing over the SAT highfalutin word or phrasing.  Because I am hyper-educated, I actually  go through my emails and rewrite them to sound more “natural.”  That is, I’ll violate many the of rules my high school teachers and college professors inculcated into me:  I use short, punchy SVO sentences with no more than two clauses; I overuse the verbs “to be,” “to go” and “to have” as linking verbs. I’ll say “you have to try to use the XXX” and not  “endeavor to your utmost to implement the XXX”. I cross out “had you XXXXX, then YYYY would have” and replace it with “Because you didn’t XXXX, YYYY.”  And so on.

Anyways, enough about me.  What about you?  I invite you to take the poll, and would love to hear about your educational attainment, your experience with education and communicating with others through the very language that all too often divides us into classes by the way we speak and write b/c of our educational — formal or informal — attainment.   

About the categories:  I’ll go by the above chart’s groupings as far as that goes, and even though the data no longer accurately reflects our best current estimates education has gotten better (more people are getting more formal education) in the past 16 years, it’s accurate enough to see where we, as a community, stand relative to the country at large.  

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After reading some relevant comments, I changed the title from “…level of education” to “…level of formal education.”  I also changed some of the text accordingly. My thanks to all those posters whose comments helped in raising the obvious difference.  Hell, thanks to everyone for participating in the survey and the comments section.  This kind of thing is one of main reasons why I come to Daily Kos: what a community of interested and interesting, thoughtful people!