Verbal Style

Verbal style was proposed by Roderick P. Hart as a method to analyze the rhetoric of presidents of the United States. Such analysis was an effort to determine the rhetorical effectiveness of the president. Because [Page 807]American presidents do not take up arms, perform manual labor, or perform medical surgery on their constituents, their primary way of leading is through the spoken word. The method of verbal style provides a computer-based content analysis of the words spoken by presidents during speeches. The word counts are then subjected to statistical analysis to determine the strength of the four variables or dictionaries that comprise the computer program (DICTION) that performs the initial word count. These four dictionaries include activity, certainty, optimism, and realism.

Activity refers to motion, or change, or the implementation of ideas; Certainty includes statements demonstrating resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness; Optimism statements endorse someone or something, offer positive descriptions, or predict favorable occurrences; Realism expresses tangible, immediate, and practical issues. Taken individually the variables might not mean much but taken collectively and analyzed as such in a presidential speech, a rhetorical picture of the president can be constructed. The analysis determines how much change to the status quo is offered in the speech (activity) or how much resolve or resistance to change is expressed (certainty). It also determines if there is praise or satisfaction offered in the speech (optimism) and whether or not the president discusses issues in a forthright, honest, and uncompromising manner (realism).

Although verbal style was designed to perform a post hoc analysis on speeches already delivered in order to determine how effective a president's speaking ability was to his governing ability, the heuristic value inherent in verbal style has been explored in other venues of presidential communication as well.

Verbal style was used in an attempt to project winners of presidential elections based on their campaign speeches. In other words, the candidate that spoke most like a president during the campaign would be elected. Although verbal style was detected in campaign speeches when candidate George H. W. Bush defeated candidate Michael Dukakis, who actually did speak more like a president based on the verbal style variables, none was statistically significant enough to claim that more use of activity, certainty, optimism, and realism was the deciding factor in the election. Further use of DICTION in the analysis of presidential campaign advertisements demonstrated that verbal style was evident in presidential commercials as well. Here again, statistical analysis of data resulted in no significance.

Future investigation of political communication in an effort to determine verbal style should analyze presidential debates in an effort to detect the verbal style present in the candidate's responses in a more spontaneous and impromptu manner. Although debates are rehearsed by the candidates, data retrieved via verbal style analysis would provide insight into the word choice selection of the particular presidential candidate during a live exchange and not from a prepared speech or commercial.