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A lot goes into a speech. Vocal intonation. Gestures. Dramatic pauses.
And then there’s the words.
It is not by happenstance that certain words are used more than others in a speech…especially not when it’s a Presidential address. So I thought it’d be interesting to put President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address into a Wordle to see what themes emerged.
Wordle takes a set of words and creates a “word cloud” that shows the relative importance of each word based on how often it is used.
The top 10 most used words from President Obama’s speech were:
- American
- America
- Americans
- Jobs
- New
- Energy
- One
- Every
- Tax
- Right
Interesting collection. The top five are no surprise. The relative position of #6 and #9 would seem to indicate that the speech had a longer-term focus vs. getting caught up in the week’s hot topics.
For mission-driven readers, #7 and #8 stand out as they spotlight a common conundrum–how do you speak to a whole while recognizing the importance of its parts? See, even the President has to use some messaging Aikido, on occasion!
What does list say to you?