It's All About Copy

Surfing around today I ran into a great piece of Internet fodder. It's by Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google. It's the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation. (Please click on it below.)

I thought this was so good I had to share it. Marketing can wait. Thanks to Matt Cutts for sharing this. Enjoy.

AP

PS - The Gettysburg address is evidence that good writing is timeless. Good copy is needed in good times, bad times, in politics and in marketing.

Here is the original political control in its entirety. It's concise, powerful and brilliant. In fewer than 300 words and delivered in just over two minutes, I'll go so far to say... it saved the nation.

Delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863. Four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Now it's 2007... see the power point version. God save us all!

Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.