After hearing the State of the Union speech last night, I was curious to see historical trends in respect to style and difficulty. I created a database of all the historical State of the Union speeches since George Washington’s in 1790 till George Bush’s in 2006 and did some analysis.
This stuff isn’t terribly useful, but some interesting things can be seen. For example, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the address has been going down. There are multiple explanations for this. The first being presidents are getting dumber or the second being that as more people are becoming involved in politics, politicians are trying to lower the difficulty of the material. In 1790 a few hundred people watched the State of the Union and yesterday there were 62 million viewers.
Play around with it when you have some free time. The site is located here.