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A lexical analysis of the State of the Union 2007

In a few minutes, president Bush will start his State of the Union speech. Matt Drudge has broken the embargo and published the whole speech on his site. I have put the text throught the Textalyser, which gave me these top ten words (after filtering stopwords):
  1. America (23)
  2. must (18)
  3. people (17)
  4. help (17)
  5. Iraq (16)
  6. government (15)
  7. insurance (14)
  8. terrorists (14)
  9. health (14)
  10. country (14)
The lexical density is 48%, the Gunning-Fog index is 9, the average number of syllables per word is 1.68 and the average number of words per sentence is 16.83. Just to compare: when George W Bush held a speech in Brussels in 2005, the Gunning-Fog index was 10.30 (which means: a lot harder to understand) and the average number of words per sentence was 17.58.

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published on Wednesday 24 January 2007 @ 02:45 CET


Comments

uw foto hier?

Joe

Friday 26 January 2007 @ 09:25 CET - #34939   
can anybody tell me what is interesting about this analysis, and how can I then convince my kids of all this?
uw foto hier?

traveller

Tuesday 30 January 2007 @ 20:22 CET - #35129   
@ luc

Do you have a comparable Clinton, Nixon, Reagan state of the union speech. Even more interesting. FDR, yes please.
bushbasher

bushbasher - selm1953 (at) gmail (dot) com

Tuesday 13 March 2007 @ 01:05 CET - #36786   
Maybe there is a coded message in there! I just composed the following sentece by using the top ten words in the correct order they are ranked, adding only some pronouns and articles for the purpose of making it grammatically correct.

"America must help [the] people [of] Iraq [and the] government [of this] country [to provide] terrorists [a] health insurance".
uw foto hier?

nicolas Raemdonck

Thursday 19 April 2007 @ 16:53 CET - #38972   
This morning there was an interview on national radio with a French professor who does the same thing. He counts specific words in speeches of French candidates for presidents and so he found out that in the eighties Mitterand always used the word immigré and Chirac immigration, meaning that Mitterand defended the person and Chirac warned us for a mass movement of persons.

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