Many people agree Churchill was a great writer, that is the reason why he won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. People also believe Churchill to be a bad orator, particularly because of his speech defect. However, two articles written by both experts from the University College of London and from the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) assure the opposite; that Churchill’s speech defect made him a great orator and that his speech “We shall fight them on the beaches” obtained a mark of F after being checked by a new computerized marking system.

On the one hand, experts from University College of London (UCL) subjected the Second World War leader’s most famous speeches to phonetic and voice patterning analysis and examined his combination of an aristocratic accent, Shakespearean allusions and down-to-earth metaphors. The programme suggests that the language defects which made Churchill a caricaturist’s gift, also made his voiceprint so distinctive.

Researchers concluded that his slight lisp, erratic pauses and constant, low tone gave his voice a uniquely recognizable quality, while his allusions to classic English literature and down-to-earth metaphors struck a chord with listeners. (Boztas, S., 2005)

On the other hand, following the study of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA), Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech would not, it seems, have flourished under the computerised marking system slowly being introduced to grade exams in the UK. When the speech was submitted to a computerised system set up to mark English literature papers, it was awarded an “F for failure”.

The computer particularly disliked Churchill’s use of repetition, as in: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, we shall fight in the hills.” His use of the word “might”, as in “the might of the Army”, was also picked out as an erroneous use of a verb instead of a noun.

Churchill was not the only famous person to fall foul of the electronic marking system – the computer also dismissed the works of Ernest Hemingway and William Golding. It decided that Hemingway was not careful enough in his choice of verbs, while Golding was found to resort to ungrammatical usage in the dramatic final scene of Lord of the Flies, in which Ralph flees from the rest of the children. (Garner, E., 2009)