Trump's Speech

As the entire world knows, Donald Trump delivered a long acceptance speech last night -- 75 minutes, the longest in decades. He used "I" 66 times, according to the official text. That may seem a lot, but he softened it with 62 uses of "we." He said "I am" 13 times (never using "Sam" before it) and said "I will" 14 times.

The official text doesn't list a single "believe me" but he added them as he went. It's among his favorite phrases. That's the salesman in him bubbling out.

Above is a word cloud of his speech, which ignores "I" and similar pronouns and small words. In that case, the winners are forms of America, country, and the usual stuff you see in political speeches. "Immigration" shows up nine times, "Muslim" only once (as "Muslim brotherhood" in Egypt as a criticism of Hillary Clinton).

Oh, yeah, "Clinton" is uttered only 11 times out of 4,634 words, as was "Hillary" (either alone or in combination). But "will" gets said 89 times, perhaps the most of any single word, best I can tell. There's probably a rhetorical paper in the use of "will."

According to one site, the reading level of the speech was grade 8.3 with 15.3 words per sentence. The longest sentence boasted 56 words. To the left are the stats, and for the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease of 62.5 that is "plain English" that is "easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students."

And yes, I hope to repeat this analysis of Clinton's acceptance speech next week.