I remember reading an article several years ago that OJ Simpson’s letter contained many basic mispellings and was cleaned up when it was published. The article strongly hinted that OJ Simpson could barely write standard English and the media corrected the spelling when parts of the letter were published.
Is this true? The Wikipedia article has a brief excerpt from the letter in standard English including the correct use of “Nicole’s” which is often spelled incorrectly.
This article cites a couple of examples that suggest he’s not a great linguist. One was his alleged suicide note, the other was a love letter to Nicole. It’s a humor article, but the fact remains that both examples of his writing contained spelling and grammar errors.
Did he require some editorial help? Yes, according to Jeffrey Toobin’s book, when Robert Kardashian read OJ’s suicide note in front of the cameras, he cleaned up the grammatical errors while reading it.
However, I think it’s a huge leap to go from here to an assertion that Simpson “could barely write standard English” or, as others have claimed, that he was illiiterate. The readbilty tools in MS Word give the two un-edited documents a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score of 5.4 and 4.3, which is a little low, but not alarmingly so.
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