President Trump's State of the Union speech was last night, and it seemed to me it dragged on a bit. That's because it was apparently the slowest SOTU speech in history, based on average number of words spoken per minute. The chart below, based on these data, was created by Josh Katz. (The R code for the chart is here. Note the use of his needs package to load the required R packages.)
Peter Aldhous at Buzzfeed analyzed last night's State of the Union speech as well. Not only was the speech delivered slowly, the script was at a 9-year-old's reading level, following a long-term decline in the complexity of State of the Union speeches.
You can find more analysis of this and past SOTU speeches at the link below. The R code behind the analysis can be found here. (You may also want to check out this analysis of Trump's Twitter activity and the associated R code.)
Buzzfeed: “I Have The Best Words.” How Trump’s First SOTU Compares To All The Others.