Is President Obama writing his speeches around Twitter?

During the recent State of the Union address, the White House’s communications team tweeted lines from the speech almost verbatim as they were spoken.

It was a tech-savvy move, especially since the president’s Twitter account has 6.6 million followers, the fourth most of anyone on Twitter.

But it raises the question of which came first: the speech or the tweet.

White House speechwriters did not respond to multiple requests from Congress.org for comment on their social-media strategy.

But former speechwriters and other experts said it was an interesting question.

A recent study by the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesota using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test found the State of the Union was written at an 8.8 grade level, the second lowest for any president.

The Flesch-Kincaid study, which determines the readability level of written texts, showed the text in Obama’s speech to be at a grade level of 8.1, according to Smart Politics. His 2010 speech was rated at an 8.8 grade level.

One reason was shorter sentences.

Smart Politics used the test on the last sixty nine State of the Union speeches delivered by Presidents orally, and Obama’s had an average of 16.8 words per sentence, the fifth lowest since 1934, according to Smart Politics.

Could the idea of catchy tweets have had an influence on the low readability of Obama’s speech? The limit for a single tweet is 140 characters, and most of the quotes posted were exact sentences taken directly from the speech.

Lee W. Huebner, former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Airlie Professor of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, said that the tweets were just an extension of the longstanding effort to craft good sound bites.

“I think communicators in general have been very aware of the sound bite possibilities ever since television arrived,” Huebner said. “Nixon sometimes asked the writers to try to identify in advance the one or two sentences that would were most likely to be quoted in the lead paragraph of a newspaper story.”

Like Huebner, Gemma Puglisi, Assistant Professor at American University’s School of Communication, refers to previous presidential speeches that had ‘tweetable’ quotes, such as John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” iconic line, Puglisi said.

“[The President is] making sure he gets the message across to the people… and [there’s] a very large audience,” she said. “Obviously you’re going to get messages that will be easy to tweet.”

The State of the Union address goes through a very long process before the final version is read, according to Glastris. Writing it begins during the fall, with the president and his senior leadership determining what the key issues are and what the agenda for the next year will be. 

“Lots and lots of ideas filter up through the bureaucracy and the different offices of the White House,” he said. “A handful are selected, and the speechwriters are brought into the process, and at that point it’s a matter of organizing the ideas and talking to the president about the broader themes he would like to put forth.”

The speechwriters then write a first draft, which goes through many changes, culminating in days of rehearsal in the family theater of the east wing of the White House, where the president’s family, speechwriters, and advisers watch, Glastris said.

“The president stands at the podium going through the speech, and line by line, at least this is what Clinton did, [he edits] the speech, asking for changes,” he said. “Usually a few dozen people will suggest alternative language…and over several hours, the speech gets transformed.”

The President has a huge say in the finalized speech, and has the ability to add and change anything, said Kenneth Khachigian, chief speech writer for Ronald Reagan.

“[With Reagan], if he wasn’t happy with it, he’d change it in an instant,” Khachigian said. “You never pulled a fast one and got something in there that he didn’t like.”

The finalized State of the Union Speech blends together the ideas of multiple people and hones a clear national theme and direction for the country, Huebner said.

Former Clinton speechwriter Paul Glastris argued that because of this process, it would be a stretch to build the speech around Twitter.

“Writing that speech is so stressful, requires so much effort and language tradeoffs in order to squeeze stuff in, make it comprehensible, make it elegant and presidential and resonant…that I just can’t imagine him or his senior staff adding hugely to that pressure just for the sake of Twitter feeds,” said Glastris, now editor of The Washington Monthly.

Twitter and social networking sites are just new ways of communicating, and more people seem to have access to cell phones and the Internet than to television, so tweeting a speech is just a new way to get the message out to more people, Puglisi said. Still, there are drawbacks.

“When you have a sound bite, you have a person saying it, and you hear it,” Puglisi said. “In this case, you don’t hear or see it, [so] you don’t know the tone of it…and it could cause a lot of harm.”

For Clark Judge, managing director of the White House Writers’ Group, the prospect of Twitter being used to broadcast good quotes is very likely, because writing good press quotes into speeches is the most elementary part of speechwriting, Judge said.

“Twitter is a way of driving the White House message…and of focusing the media on specific [quotes] ,” Judge said. “You’re always writing to be quoted [and] thinking about what leads columnists and reporters to report a particular line.”

Khachigian suggests that Twitter could have been used in the hopes of influencing the quotes media outlets would use in their coverage of the State of the Union Address, he said.

“I think we’ve gotten to the point where the White House and politicians in general work so hard to find all these ways to influence the process that in reality, I think that most journalists are going to view with skepticism the choices made by anyone,” he said. “I think it’s human nature to not want to be manipulated, so as a result I would think that a lot of reporters would…comb through the speech [themselves] for quotes.” 

As a speechwriter for both Reagan and Nixon, Khachigian and his colleagues tried to determine before the speech was given what the highlights were, and what lines were bound to be used as leads in the newspapers and sound bites for television, he said. 

“Very frankly, if you are skilled at writing a speech, you really knew what the sound bites would be,” he said. “You really do get a sense of what [reporters] are looking for to make their story work.”

Dan Rogers writes for CQ.