Five- M in u t e A n a lyst
State of the Union
One interesting thing
about text data is that
the entire world of written
word becomes your
analytic garden. While
exploring this garden,
I thought it would be
interesting to take a look
at the presidents’ State
of the Union addresses
through the years.
By Harrison
Schramm, CAP
68
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Lately I’ve been interested in textual data, which
has opened a whole new world of things to think – and
write – about. One interesting thing about text data
is that the entire world of written word becomes your
analytic garden. While exploring this garden, I thought
it would be interesting to take a look at the presidents’
State of the Union addresses through the years.
The State of the Union is an annual report from
the president of the United States to Congress. It can
be a venue for rolling out new policies and strategies.
We can safely assume that each administration takes
the preparation and delivery of this speech very seriously, and puts the best resources they have into it.
Therefore, the addresses may be considered a “snapshot” of the writing style of their time. The speeches
can be found for all the presidents at a number of
places; I used the American Presidency Project [1].
For this analysis, we consider the first term speeches
by the following presidents: Madison, Lincoln, Kennedy, Clinton, Bush (George W.) and Obama.
Calculating “readability” via machine methods
seems difficult at first. Fortunately, there are a number of methods available. The one that I decided to
use is the “Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level” [2], given by:
This test has several desirable properties; it is
straightforward to calculate because word and syllable counts are easily counted by machine. Second,
a n a ly t i c s - m a g a z i n e . o r g
w w w. i n f o r m s . o r g