Across all the debates, the candidates delivered just short of 42,000 words. With each debate approximately 1.5 hours in length, the amount of unique words delivered by both candidates corresponds to a delivery rate of one unique word every 4.4 seconds (3 debates x 1.5 hours x 3600 s = 16,200 seconds). The average speech rate was 2.6 words per second.

Obama delivered +9.0% more words than McCain and had a larger overall vocabulary, by +3.1%.

a c b d

a :: total number of words b :: proportion of words in the debate c :: unique words in (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Overall, Obama's stop word fraction was slightly higher than McCain's. However, Obama delivered more words throughout the debates and displayed greater range of vocabulary, with 2,369 unique non-stop words, +3.4% more than McCain.

a c b d

a :: total number of words, for a given category (all, stop, non-stop) b :: (a) relative to words in the debate if category=all, otherwise relative to words by the candidate c :: number of unique words with set (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Absolute values of word frequency statistics for a combined debate transcript are not useful because they are directly proportional to the length of the concatenated transcript. In the limit of a large number of debates, total vocabulary size approaches a limit, and as word count goes up so does word frequency.

However, a comparison between the candidates can still be made. Obama's word frequency is slightly higher than McCain's, but not by much (+3.3%).

a b c

a :: average word frequency b :: largest word frequency in 50% of content c :: largest word frequency in 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

Obama consistently delivers larger sentences, at 8.2 words, compared to McCain, at 7.0 words. Obama's sentence size distribution has a greater component of large sentences. 90% of his speech is in sentences ≤26 words in length, whereas McCain fits 90% of his speech in sentences ≤22 words in length.

a b c

a :: average sentence size b :: largest sentence size for 50% of content c :: largest sentence size for 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

This is a great table for the combined debate analysis because it shows the part of speech breakdown across three independent samples of speech and is therefore a more robust measure of the candidates' natural style than a sampling from a single event.

McCain uses more nouns than Obama, with 54.3% of his parts of speech being nouns (remember, in this analysis I only consider nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and all to the exclusion of other parts of speech), whereas Obama's fraction is 52.3%. McCain's +3.8% increase suggests speech with a greater emphasis on concrete concepts.

Verb usage is also greater by McCain, at 26.3% vs Obama's 25.6%. The difference is +2.7%, smaller than for nouns.

Once we get into adjectives and adverbs, however, it's a different story. Obama's use of adjectives and adverbs is significantly higher than McCain's. Obama's adjective fraction is +13.0% larger than McCain's and his adverb fraction is +16.1% larger than McCain's. This suggests that Obama's speech is more nuanced and that he captures and delivers more texture in his nouns and verbs than McCain.

a c b d

a :: total number of words for a given POS (all, noun, verb, adjective, adverb) b :: (a) relative to all words by candidate c :: unique words in (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

Obama's overall part of speech frequency is slightly higher than McCain, but not by much (+2.3%). He consistently has slightly greater repetition of nouns and verbs, at +4.0% and +2.0% more than McCain, respectively.

Obama's adjective and adverb use frequency is much higher than McCain's, however, at +9.6% and +4.8%, respectively. This increase reflects the greater proportion of adjectives and adverbs in Obama's speech.

a b c

a :: average word frequency b :: largest word frequency in 50% of content c :: largest word frequency in 90% of content bar :: proportion of a:b:c

Obama has larger delivery of all pairings. The largest difference is in adverb/adverb pairings, with Obama having twice as many as McCain.

When compared to Obama, McCain has significantly lower parings that include adjectives and adverbs. While for combinations of nouns and verbs McCain is at 76-85% of Obama, when adjectives and adverbs are brought into the mix McCain is at 50-72%.

These numbers starkly illustrate Obama's greater penchant for precision and modification.

a c b d

a :: total number of pairs, for a given category (e.g. verb/noun) b :: (a) relative to all pairs c :: number of unique pairs within set (a) d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: proportion of (a-c):c

a c   d b e

a :: total number of pairs for Barack Obama b :: relative unique pairs for Barack Obama c :: total pairs for John McCain d :: (c) relative to (a) (i.e. John McCain relative to Barack Obama) e :: relative unique pairs for John McCain bars :: values of (a), (b), (c) and (e)

This is another table that benefits from a combined debate treatment. Here we can see the number of words, by part of speech, spoken exclusively by one candidate, or by both. Presumably, as the number of debates increases, the number of words spoken by one candidate but not the other steadily decreases, until it reaches some core value that represents words truly unique to that candidate (e.g. the other candidate does not know the word, or consciously avoids using it).

The key values to draw your attention to are the number of exclusive unique words (first two rows, second column for each part of speech). This number corresponds to the exclusive contribution by each candidate to the vocabulary of the speech.

For example, of the 1,859 unique nouns used in the debate, 629 (33.8%) were spoken by both candidates, 600 (32.3%) by McCain only and 576 (31.0%) by Obama only. McCain thus contributed more nouns to the debate, and his repetition of these words was lower than Obama (55.6% vs 62.4%).

When it comes to verbs, however, Obama's contribution is higher, at 34.2% of all debate verbs vs 29.9% for McCain. Note that verbs were the parts of speech that had the lowest shared fraction — only 28.2% of verbs in the debate were spoken by both candidates.

Obama also contributed a greater variety of adjectives and adverbs to the debate. In particular, Obama's contribution to adverbs was 34.2% compared to 24.1% for McCain. In other words, for every 3 adverbs used by Obama not spoken by McCain, McCain had only 2 not spoken by Obama.

The profile presented in this table closely matches previous the result of previous work by Pennebaker) in which McCain is concluded to be a categorical thinker (heavy noun use), while Obama is fluid and contextual (verb and modifier use).

a d b e c f

a :: total number of words unique to a candidate, for a given POS group b :: (a) relative to all unique words to the candidate c :: (a) relative to all words d :: unique words in (a) e :: (d) relative to (a) f :: (d) relative to all unique words bar1 :: normalized ratio of (a-d):d bar2 :: absolute ratio of (a-d):d for all POS groups (first column) or POS group (other columns)

Obama delivered +3.8% more noun phrases than McCain. He had +6.5% more top-level noun phrases and +2.1% more derived noun phrases. The increase of top-level noun phrases is greater than the increase of derived noun phrases, suggesting greater variation in concept usage.

a c b d

a :: number of noun phrases b :: (a) relative to number of all noun phrases c :: number of unique phrases d :: (c) relative to (a) bar :: normalized ratio of (a-c):c

Number of noun phrases relative to the number of nouns remains relatively constant.

a b	a :: ratio of the number of noun phrases to number of nouns b :: ratio of the number of unique noun phrases to number of unique nouns bar :: ratio of a:b

Noun phrase frequency and size remains relatively constant.

a b c

a :: average b :: 50% weighted cumulative value c :: 90% weighted cumulative value bar1 :: normalized ratio of a:b:c

This index is not particularly well suited for a combined analysis, because it is expected that the candidates repeat themselves across three debates. The same points will be brought up, the same questions asked, and so on. Naturally, the more words are said the more words are repeated, since the pool of unique words is fixed.

The Windbag Index is +15.6% greater for Obama. Although he does better for verbs, and 2/3 of the noun phrase metrics, his uniqueness scores in other categories are lower.

Across all the debates, Obama maintains "important" as his most important (ha ha) word. Note "energy", "health", "economic", "care", "tax" and "people" are central concepts.

In stark contrast, McCain truly feels that "nuclear" is an important topic and as relatively important as "Obama".

The unique word clouds are particularly informative in a combined debate analysis. The more words said, the fewer words are attributed to only one candidate and these gain importance with increased number of debate samples. Remember, these are words spoken by one candidate, but not the other, across all debates.

Obama's unique words have a large noun component, with words such as "notion", "fundamentals", "consequence", and "wages". His most prominent unique word was the verb "agree", which McCain did not use (note: there is no stemming done in the analysis — McCain did use "agreed"). Obama's use of "potentially" suggests openness to complications and the unforeseen.

McCain's unique words on the other hand focus nearly exclusively on verbs. He uses strong action words such as "opposes" and "legitimize" which suggest a confrontational and unilateral view. His top unique adverb was "badly", which suggests an attack stance (presumably the word is used in context of his opponent).

Do you see many blue words? Those are nouns exclusive to McCain and there is is hardly a blue word in sight. It is shocking how overwhelming Obama's delivery drowns out McCain's contribution in the realm of nouns across all the debates.

The third debate saw a cloud like this, but McCain at least managed to get a few words into the cloud.

For verbs, McCain's contribution was overwhelming — a situation opposite to that of nouns. Take a look, however, at what Obama brings to the cloud: words like "agree", "invest", "recognize", "focused" and "thinking". Obama's contribution is that of conciliation and careful consideration.

Split in adjective contribution is more even between the debaters. McCain's curious repetition of "angry", "excess" and "afraid" contrasts Obama's central use of "enormous" as well as "strategic", "easy" and "local".

McCain, though delivering fewer adverbs than Obama, repeats them quite a bit. Here, his relative usage contribution outweights Obama's. Contrast McCain's "badly" to Obama's "potentially". McCain comes across as a hard-liner whereas Obama comes across as moderate.

When all parts of speech are compared, Obama is easily the greater verbal force. McCain's contribution is absolutely swamped out by Obama's unique words.

An interesting adjective/adverb pairing frequent for Obama is "military never", as well as "correct quickly". Cross all debates, the top pairings suggest focus on "care health" (large noun/noun component), and "think understand" (large verb/verb component).

McCain's repetition of "nuclear power" and "national security" drowns out any mention of economy or domestic policy. His largest verb/verb pairing is "america united" (compare this to "think understand" for Obama), and a large component to adverb/verb is "completely control". McCain's stance is one of nationalism and certainty.