How many words per sentence are there in U.S. presidential inauguration speeches?

 

That’s a question I never asked. But there is a recent article by N. L. Tsizhmovska and L. M. Martyushev (from the Ural Federal University in Russia) titled Analysis of Sentence Lengths in Public Speaking which answers it. That article appeared in an American Institute of Physics publication titled The VII International Young Researchers’ Conference – Physics, Technology, Innovations (PTI-2000).

They looked at all 58 speeches from 1789 to 2017. From 1789 to 1809 the mean (average) sentence length in a speech was about 50 words, while from 1997 to 2017 it had dropped to just about 20 words. It dropped linearly, as did the median. They also concluded that sentence lengths obeyed a Weibull distribution. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The straight line they showed in their Figure 1 is plotted above. Their text says the linear regression equation is Mean Length = 287.6 – 0.14*Year, but that is a different line about 7 words lower in 1900. For 2020 an average length of 14 words is predicted. The decrease in lengths is so slow that it can only be detected by analyzing over a very long time.