Top ten words at the debate: Clinton v Trump
It was the word “disaster” that caught my attention in the second presidential debate on Sunday night, the way Donald Trump seemed to relish using it. It wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton presented a very different America, it was the fact that she actually used the word “America” and talked to “Americans.” At the end of the debate I wanted to know more about the words they were using and how they compared. I’m a writer, after all, and I know that words matter.
So I got the transcript of the debate and did a little analysis. It started with counting. I separated Clinton text from Trump text and learned that Clinton said a total of 6,359 words while Trump said 7,144 words.
Then I dropped the text files into online software that generated lists of each candidate’s words and a count of how many times they appeared. The software removes words that aren’t substantive like “the” and “or.” From this I found that Clinton said 1,199 different words, compared to Trump’s 1,071 words. In other words (pun intended), Clinton may have said fewer words in total, but she used a 12 percent larger vocabulary.
Then I looked at the top ten most-used words more than three letters long for each. There are some similarities — such as “people” and “country,” but there are some striking differences as well:
One of the words we writers are warned against using is “thing.” It’s a generic word that should always be replaced with a noun of greater specificity and strength. So I looked up how many times the candidates used either “thing” or “things.” The difference is startling:
If “thing” is a weak, small word, I also wanted to know about the big words they both used. Here are the top five words longer than two syllables long used by each of the candidates:
One of the most notable differences was their comparative use of the word “America” or “Americans.” After all, that’s what this job is all about, right? Clinton said one of these two words a total of 20 times during the debate. Trump, by comparison, said them 10 times. “Disaster,” that word that started me onto this exercise, he said 17 times.
Every writer knows, it’s not only the sentences and ideas but the very words we choose that tell our stories. The words we use also tell the world who we are. The words our candidates use count too.
