Obama victory speech

Another in a series of Public Wordles, analysing rhetoric. Above, a Wordle of the 170 most common words in President Obama's victory speech last night in Chicago. Plenty of good discussion material here for class today. Click on the image above for a closer view.

Now for a Wordle of Mitt Romney's concession speech for comparison (again, click here for a closer look, and here for the video)

Below, the President delivers his speech.

The Mahon Tribunal word-cloud

Click on the image for a closer view.

Above, another in our series of Public Wordles examining the way 'official' language is used in speeches and documents.

Yesterday, the immense final report of the Mahon Tribunal into planning scandals was published. This word-cloud condenses the 3270 pages of the report into the 100 most-used words (the larger the word, the more often it was used).

Names feature prominently of course (though perhaps surprisingly 'Ahern' is relatively small). Some interesting words are 'satisfied', 'political', and 'claimed'. And there's no doubt that this report focusses on men...

Above, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin's response (the 230 most common words). Again, click for a closer view.

Enda Kenny on the Cloyne Report

It's already clear that the Taoiseach's speech responding to the Cloyne Report is one of the most significant statements by a public figure since the foundation of the State. Above is the latest in our irregular series of public Wordles, picking out key words in important public and political language. There is no doubt what the key word is here.

Click on the image to see it in detail. Watch the speech here.

Programme for Government

Programme for Government, March 2011

Another in our series of 'public wordles', using Wordle.net to analyse speeches and official language in documents:- here is Towards Recovery: Programme for a National Government, which yesterday was agreed on by the Labour Party and Fine Gael following their successes in the recent General Election (click on the image to examine it more closely). As always, the largest words are those most used in the document (of 220). Below, two more images - of the same parties' general election manifestos (interesting comparisons to be made).

Fine Gael Manifesto 2011

Labour Party Manifesto 2011

General Election Manifestos via Wordle

We've started using Wordle to examine public speeches and documents; these are useful for many subjects. In English, they're a fine way of starting to examine public rhetoric, and 'official' language. Look previously at President Obama's Tucson speech (compared to Sarah Palin), the 2010 Irish budget, and the Irish 'Four Year Plan'.

Fine Gael have just published their 2011 Irish General Election manifesto, completing the party line-up of documents. So here are the manifestos of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the Green Party, and Sinn Féin for comparison (looking for The Socialist Party one still). As always, click on the images for larger views. The larger the word, the more it is used in the document. Some might be interested in the relative smallness of 'Fianna Fáil' in that party's manifesto. Comments welcome below the post (moderated).

Fianna Fáil

Fine Gael

Labour Party

Sinn Féin

The Green Party

Obama in Tucson

As part of a series of Wordles on language used by public speakers and in public documents (useful for language study in English as well as in subjects such as History, CSPE, Economics, Religion and so on), here is a word cloud of the text of President Obama's well-received speech in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday. Click on the image for a closer look. You can see and hear the speech itself below. There's also a fascinating comparison to be made with Sarah Palin's controversial 'blood libel' speech (again, click for a larger view).

Brian Lenihan's Budget speech

(Click on the image for a closer view)

Following on from the Wordle we recently posted of the National Recovery Plan, which got a lot of attention, here is another, this time of Finance Minister Brian Cowan's budget speech yesterday in the Dáil. These are the 300 most-used words in the text of what he said. An exercise in class would be to compare the two; yesterday's is of course more rhetorical than the previously-published plan, being a speech delivered in a parliament.

The Four-Year Plan

We've used Wordle for lots of literary purposes before, including our Shakespeare Wordle series. Here's another kind of text- yesterday's Irish 'National Recovery Plan 2011-2014', and the 300 most-used words in the document. Handy for English, History, Economics and perhaps some other subjects.

Click on the image for a larger view.