( CNN ) -- Language experts weighed in Thursday after poring over the nearly 2,700 words of President Obama 's Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster . `` It was straightforward and easy to understand , '' said Ron Yaros , assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland , referring to the explanations of the crisis and its possible solutions . He divided the speech into 1,200 `` idea units , '' each of which represents a point the president was trying to make . He then looked at how many of those idea units contained jargon -- unexplained terms that the average person might not recognize -- and found none in the 65 idea units that explained the problem . Of the 417 idea units that discussed what Obama planned to do , `` I found only one idea unit that probably would be potentially confusing to a nonexpert . That was the term 'relief well . ' He never explained that . '' BP is digging a relief well that is expected to intersect with the blown-out well in August . At that point , BP plans to pump heavy drilling fluid into the runaway well , ending the flow . `` If you look at the entire speech , and you look at the amount of jargon , it came out to 1.5 percent , '' he said . iReporter : Obama 's speech too fuzzy on details . But Obama 's speech may have gone over the heads of many in his audience , according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday by Paul J.J. Payack , president of Global Language Monitor . Tuesday night 's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level , said Payack , who gave Obama a `` solid B . '' His Austin , Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture . He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate : `` That is why just after the rig sank , I assembled a team of our nation 's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge -- a team led by Dr. Steven Chu , a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation 's secretary of energy . '' `` A little less professorial , less academic and more ordinary , '' Payack recommended . `` That 's the type of phraseology that makes you [ appear ] aloof and out of touch . '' Yaros disagreed , supporting the quality of the president 's explanation for spelling out the efforts under way , even if they have not succeeded in ending the flow . `` He 's just trying to be transparent , '' Yaros said . `` We ca n't cure cancer , but I 'm comforted to know that the best researchers in the nation are devoted to finding a cure . '' Payack found these three sentences insensitive : `` Already , this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced . And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane , it is not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days . The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic , one that we will be fighting for months and even years . '' `` You should n't be saying that in Katrina-land , '' said Payack , referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast . `` New Orleans lost a third of its population [ to evacuees who did not return ] ; it 's still recovering . '' But he praised Obama 's phrase `` oil began spewing '' as active and graphic . Obama 's nearly 10th-grade-level rating was the highest of any of his major speeches and well above the grade 7.4 of his 2008 `` Yes , we can '' victory speech , which many consider his best effort , Payack said . `` The scores indicate that this was not Obama at his best , especially when attempting to make an emotional connection to the American people , '' he added . Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph , his 19.8 words per sentence `` added some difficulty for his target audience , '' Payack said . Mark Liberman , a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania , was unimpressed with Payack 's criticism of the sentence length . `` I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using , especially in addressing the nation after a disaster , '' Liberman wrote on his blog . `` Why , they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush , that notorious pointy-headed intellectual , used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina , where I count 3,283 words in 140 sentences , for an average of 23.45 words per sentence ! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech ! '' Yaros challenged the value of Payack 's analysis . `` There 's a tremendous amount of difference between analyzing the written word and interpreting the spoken word , '' said Yaros , a former science reporter who studies how to make complex topics understandable . Payack acknowledged Thursday in a telephone interview that his analysis is indeed based on a written version of the speech , but said that does not necessarily render it invalid . `` With the internet , probably as many people read the transcript as heard it , '' he said . `` To think it 's not read and analyzed by tens of thousands of bloggers is looking at the old model . '' Yaros countered that he does n't just count words and sentences , but instead measures the audience 's comprehension of news content . Liberman said the `` grade level '' calculation had been debunked as `` a mindless bit of math '' that does not take into account the skill with which words were chosen or delivered . Yaros , too , declined to rank the speech by grade level . `` In my opinion , placing a 'grade level ' on 2,698 written words that are spoken ( with a variety of delivery aspects such as pauses , emphases ) does NOT accurately represent the importance of clear explanations about the KEY information presented in the speech , '' he said in an e-mail . `` In other words , I could confuse you with my introduction and conclusion , but if -- in the middle of my talk -- I specifically addressed and answered your concerns , then I have adequately communicated what you CARED about . ''
Nearly 2,700 words with little jargon . Comment: Payack gives Obama `` Solid B ''