Mayor Carl Brewer plans to give his second State of the City speech Tuesday night at 6 p.m. Invitations to the speech were sent out a week ago, but no official announcement has been posted on the city’s web site. Brewer, who has struggled with some speeches and proclamations, has been rehearsing the speech for at least a week.
Last year, Brewer spoke to a packed city council chamber of mostly invitees. His 3,800-word speech drew applause more than 30 times, giving it the feel of a State of the State or State of the Union address. But his themes were hyper-local, addressing gang violence, the murder of Robert Ridge, fighting blight and retaining and attracting business — particularly in the aviation sector, where Brewer worked until he was elected as mayor, a full-time job, in 2007. This year, we anticipate that the speech will focus on layoffs in the aviation sector and downtown development.
In keeping with the parallels between the city speech and those of governors and presidents, here is a “word cloud” image that balloons the words he used the most in his 2007 address. This cloud was created using Wordle. Similar clouds are used by major media outlets, such as The New York Times, to give readers a sense of the dominating themes of speeches.
Brewer speech cloud
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One invite I’m delighted NOT to get!
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[...] The Eagle created it using the text of Brewer’s speech and Wordle.net. Click here to see the word cloud from his 2008 speech and to read more about word clouds. Or click here to read this year’s speech as it was [...]