 |
 |
 |
 |
Bring clarity to key messages |
|
|
|
Write stronger media pitches |
|
|
|
Boost value to clients |
|
|
|
Draft more compelling news releases |
|
|
|
Get more from your
emails |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
| |
| "The feedback from the staff was phenomenal!
Consistently, everyone loved the session and felt they got
much out of it that can be put to use today.” |
Hannah Coan
Man. Dir., Publicis Consultants - PR
(Seattle) |
|
| "This
class is great for PR professionals new and old. Wiley
teaches tips and tools that can help even the best writer." |
Drew Milam
Senior
Account Executive |
 Read More |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Obama's Feb. 25, 2009 speech
to Congress |
Thanks to Wordle.net, we're able to see a
 graphic
of President Obama's most used words in his speech to a joint
session of Congress on Feb. 25, 2009. Click on the image or
this link to see the larger original.
Obama often is
compared to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the first president to work
tirelessly to make what he wrote and said easy for people to read
and understand. He was the first to make an effort to get rid of big
words. In fact, Lincoln's writings and speeches relied mostly on
one- and two-syllable words, a rare style in his day.
In
modern times, we have tools to measure the types of words a person
chooses. Abraham Lincoln averaged fewer than 1.5 syllables per word
(his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, offered just 1.35
syllables per word). If you look at the Flesch scores for
President Lincoln, they were almost always above 60, the score where
clarity truly starts to emerge.
So what about President
Obama? With a Harvard law degree and widely known for being smarter
than most of the rest of us, you might expect Obama to rely on
bigger words. Not so. President Obama labors to make what he writes
and says easy for most of us to follow.
In his speech to the
joint session of Congress, Obama used mostly small words with an
average of just 1.48 syllables per word. His Flesch score was 60.6.
Press reports across the board said it was a great speech that
connected with the American public.
In this Wordle image,
clearly the most prominent word is American. Obama used it 25 times.
He also used the words America and Americans 31 times. (Wordle
ignores common words, such as "a," "and" and "the.") Obama once
again shows us that it is okay to use big words, but when you
do you must surround them with small ones. The two other most
used words in his speech, by the way, were "economy" (22 times) and
"people" (20 times).
You might be wondering about Gov. Bobby
Jindal's
 response
that has been so roundly panned. Many say that it was his delivery
that was so bad and a review of his actual words tend to back up
that view. His speech scored a 59.2, which is only slightly below
the 60 threshold for clarity, and he let his syllables per word
count creep above my benchmark to 1.54. I think, though, that one
reason Jindal's speech failed to connect was his choice of big
words. Jindal's most used words were: government (12 times),
Republicans (11 times) and Washington (10 times). Click on the
image or
here to see a larger version I saved at Wordle.net.
Remember, content must come first, then you work on word choices and
sentence construction. Jindal should have followed Mark Twain's
advice and spent a tad more time editing.
|
|
|
