What is the V.E.T. Method
The V.E.T. Method is diagnostic text analysis. Vulnerability, Empathy, and Truth, counted sentence by sentence in speeches that already exist. It is not a formula for writing yours.
Each sentence gets a mark, or none. When in doubt, none. Vulnerability is rare. Those marks become a Coded Total. Scale is that total divided by word count, times 10,000, so a short speech and a long one can be compared.
What gets counted
- Vulnerability
- The speaker puts something of their own at risk: a failure, a fear, a limit, a cost they actually paid.
- Empathy
- The speaker takes up another person’s inner life, not a crowd in the abstract.
- Truth
- A claim that can be checked, a fact that constrains the argument, something the record can hold.
The archive on this site is that count, done to speeches already given. The PDFs show the marks in the margin.
Scale leaders in the 20th-century set include Lou Gehrig’s Farewell to Baseball, Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream, and William Faulkner’s Nobel address.