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Abstract
The president's annual message on the State of the Union both registers and affects significant political trends. This paper provides an introduction to systematic, empirical, and continuing inquiry into these trends. It is based on a forthcoming computergenerated concordance to the annual messages for the post-war period 1945-1984. While the concordance is designed for content analysis, interpretations of content can be enriched (or corroborated or disconfirmed) by considering changes in the medium of the message, its audience, and the pattern of control, and by the assessment of message effects.