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OK, so I’m prob­a­bly one of the few peo­ple in the world not to see the whole she­bang live but read­ing the tran­script in the paper today I was awestruck by the writ­ing. It man­aged to be grand with­out being too grandiose. It felt fresh but still hit the right tone for a world-stage occasion.

There were some beau­ti­ful phrases:

To those who cling to power through cor­rup­tion and deceit and the silenc­ing of dis­sent, know that you are on the wrong side of his­tory; but that we will extend a hand if you are will­ing to unclench your fist.

And:

Now, there are some who ques­tion the scale of our ambi­tions – who sug­gest that our sys­tem can­not tol­er­ate too many big plans. Their mem­o­ries are short. For they have for­got­ten what this coun­try has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imag­i­na­tion is joined to com­mon pur­pose, and neces­sity to courage.

And:

As we con­sider the road that unfolds before us, we remem­ber with hum­ble grat­i­tude those brave Amer­i­cans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and dis­tant moun­tains. They have some­thing to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arling­ton whis­per through the ages.

Lovely stuff.

The speech uses many of the rhetor­i­cal rules and yet knows exactly when to break them for effect.

The papers are all count­ing up the most used words – the word ‘ter­ror’ gets just a sin­gle men­tion for instance. Of course, online there are bet­ter ways of doing this using the likes of Wor­dle which pro­duces this:

You can see the orig­i­nal (and make your own) here.

And for the word geeks out there, I’ve also done a quick mark-up of the speech itself to pull out some of the tech­niques I find inter­est­ing. You can down­load a PDF here.

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