Politicians care about spelling and grammar

Last year, Dan Butler and David Broockman published an article showing that African American constituents who wrote to state legislators were less likely to receive a response than white constituents were. Jayme Neiman, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, has applied this same framework to a new idea -- the quality of written correspondence. She details the results in her MPSA paper "Does Quality Matter? State Legislative Response to Constituent Communication."

Basically, she sent out e-mails to a random selection of state legislators across the country. Half received a well-written request for information on registering to vote, and the other half received a poorly-worded, poorly-spelled piece of drivel on the same topic. Neiman reports than 62 percent of the well-written e-mails received a response, while only 45% of the poorly-written ones did. Legislators were also more likely to respond themselves (rather than refer the letter to a staffer for response) to the well-written ones.

From my own experiences answering mail for politicians, poorly-written letters are less of a concern than crazy ones -- aliens, fluoride conspiracies, etc. But I admit that's a lot harder to operationalize in a study.