A first-person autobiography?!

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wmdouglas80 on November 23rd, 2020 at 19:14 UTC »

You think that's bad? Just wait till you read Trump's

aGiantmutantcrab on November 23rd, 2020 at 19:30 UTC »

So D'Souza is... what, exactly? Who is this individual?

TheAstrogoth on November 23rd, 2020 at 21:13 UTC »

Dinesh is obviously ridiculous, but I thought it would be fun to compare the occurrence of first person pronouns in Obama's new memoir with Ronald Reagan's 1990 autobiography.

I used countwordsfree.com to get word totals.

Barack Obama, A Promised Land (2020):

Total occurrences - 8795: "I" - 4634 "I'm" - 73 "I'd" - 565 "I've" - 37 "I'll" - 21 "me" - 1143 "my" - 2322 Total words in book - 309431 Percentage - 2.84%

Ronald Reagan, An American Life (1990):

Total occurrences - 10487: "I" - 6027 "I'm" - 140 "I'd" - 499 "I've" - 104 "I'll" - 70 "me" - 1995 "my" - 1662 Total words in book - 265703 Percentage - 3.95%

It turns out conservative icon Reagan used more first-person pronouns in a shorter book. Huh.

EDIT: Adding The Art of the Deal, even though it's a different kind of book and ghostwritten.

Donald Trump & Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (1987):

Total occurrences - 4019: "I" - 2418 "I'm" - 143 "I'd" - 211 "I've" - 75 "I'll" - 4 "me" - 407 "my" - 761 Total words in book - 96860 Percentage - 4.15%

Uh oh...

EDIT2: u/sxales correctly pointed out that Reagan's An American Life was also ghostwritten. Don't know how I missed that, as it's right at the top of the Wikipedia page I linked.