Analysis of "War Message," A Speech by Woodrow Wilson
((If you would like to view the PDF version of this historic speech, click here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Woodrow%20Wilson%20-%20War%20Message.pdf))
For this blog, I chose to do a computational analysis of a political speech rather than any other speech genre. In politics, speeches are invaluable tools that have the abilities to move, sway opinions, and garner or lose favor. One such speech is Woodrow Wilson's War Speech. War Speech was delivered to Congress on April 2nd, 1917 and was the turning point for America entering World War I and combating the Central Powers.
Political speeches, especially in more recent years, have gained the stigma of being untrustworthy and shady. One way to dissect a speech to ascertain the speaker's true intent is to look for repetition of a word or words. After running War Speech through Voyant Tools, the following graph was generated:
Out of the entire speech of 3,679 words, the word "government" was the most used and shows up thirty times throughout the script. The next most used are: right (17), war (17), German (16), and people (16). This quick analysis of the text and corresponding image shows a true, direct nature--Woodrow Wilson stayed on topic and only used terms relevant to the issue at hand.