Patterns of Speech: 75 Years of the State of the Union Addresses

I came across this NY Times Article while reading a Wisconsin teacher's blog, "An American Studies."  The author had taken the last 2 State of the Union Addresses and copied and pasted the text into Wordle to form a word cloud of the most frequently used words.  He then proceeded to discuss with his class why they thought some words were used more frequently than others and what message they thought the president was trying to convey. (Wordle allows the user to limit the number of words used...the author limited cloud to the top 50 words).