Speech writing is live by civtest

If you write speeches, conference talks, eulogies, toasts, or anything meant to be spoken aloud, CivNode now has a dedicated surface for it. Create a speech from the Create menu. Pick a template (political, keynote, toast, eulogy, conference talk) or start blank. The editor opens with a delivery-time ruler on the left margin and a stats panel on the right. Everything updates as you type. **What the stats panel shows** The panel computes metrics deterministically. No AI model is involved anywhere in the feature. *Delivery time* is calculated per-sentence based on syllable count, pauses between sentences, paragraph breaks, and any pause markers you insert. It accounts for the difference between conversational pacing (140 words per minute in English, faster in Spanish) and ceremonial pacing (eulogies, weddings). Three presets: Conversational, Formal, Ceremonial. The number in the ruler margin tells you where you are in the speech at each line. *LIX* is a cross-language readability score used across Scandinavian and European publishing. A good speech sits between 30 and 45. Below 25 reads as childish; above 55 feels like a tax code. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address scores 48 (dense for a speech, but it was 272 words and every one counted). *Flesch-Kincaid* is the English-only grade-level equivalent. Aim for 6 to 9 for a general audience. Most effective political speeches land around 8. *Breath test* counts sentences where the syllable count exceeds what a speaker can comfortably say in one breath at the chosen cadence. If the stat is anything other than "all clear", split the sentence or add a pause marker. *Filler words* flags words that read fine on paper but stick out when spoken. Basically, just, actually, really, literally. *Passive voice* percentage. Active voice keeps a speech muscular. Under 15% is the target. **Rhetorical devices** The editor detects nine classical rhetorical devices in your text and underlines them with subtle dashed decorations. Each device type has its own colour. *Anaphora* is the same opening repeated across clauses. Lincoln does it three times in one sentence: we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow. *Tricolon* is three parallel clauses. The most famous in English: of the people, by the people, for the people. *Chiasmus* is an A-B-B-A reversal. Susan B. Anthony mirrors aristocracy and oligarchy in her 1873 suffrage speech. *Antithesis* is explicit contrast. Patrick Henry builds his closing around it: give me liberty or give me death. *Alliteration* is three or more content words starting with the same consonant cluster within a short window. Common in political and ceremonial speech. *Asyndeton* drops conjunctions between parallel clauses. I came, I saw, I conquered. Makes the pace faster. *Polysyndeton* adds extra conjunctions. And this and that and the other. Slower, more deliberate. *Hypophora* asks a rhetorical question and immediately answers it. *Epistrophe* repeats the same ending across clauses. The inverse of anaphora. The panel summarises device counts so you can see at a glance whether your rhetoric is balanced or leaning too heavily on one technique. **Inline tools** *Pause markers* insert a timed pause into your speech. They affect the delivery-time calculation. Use the toolbar button or type [pause]. *Stage cues* are non-spoken annotations: beat, applause, stage direction, media cue. They appear inline but are excluded from delivery-time calculations. *Speaker notes* are margin annotations anchored to a point in your text. Visible to you while writing and rehearsing, invisible to everyone else. Reminders to make eye contact, slow down, gesture. **Rehearsing** *Teleprompter* scrolls your speech at your chosen pace. Enter it from the stats panel. It auto-scrolls based on your audience preset. *Read aloud* uses your browser's built-in text-to-speech. Works offline, no external service. *Revision history* saves past versions so you can compare drafts and restore earlier text. **Supported languages** English, English (US), English (GB), German, Spanish, French. The language is auto-detected. Each language has its own syllable-per-minute table sourced from phonetics research, so delivery times are accurate across languages, not just English with a multiplier. **The library corpus** We have added 26 public-domain historical speeches to the library, spanning 1588 to 1936. English, German, French, Spanish. Lincoln, Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Patrick Henry, Elizabeth I, Bismarck, Robespierre, Danton, Hugo, Bolivar, Unamuno, and others. Open any of them in the editor and the rhetoric decorations light up on real historical text. It is one thing to read about tricolon; it is another to see it underlined in the Gettysburg Address while the stats panel tells you Lincoln spent 2 minutes and 40 seconds saying it. Fork any library speech as a starting point for your own work. Notable speeches we cannot host due to copyright (MLK, JFK, Churchill, Brandt, De Gaulle) are linked to Wikisource so you can study them externally. Browse the corpus at civnode.com/library/speeches. **Privacy** All speech analysis runs on our server in Nuremberg, Germany. Your text never leaves European jurisdiction. No US cloud services are involved. No AI model is called. The entire feature is deterministic rule-based computation: syllable counting, regex pattern matching, LanguageTool grammar analysis. GDPR by design. **Open source** The two Go packages that power the analysis are open source: rhetoric-go detects rhetorical devices in prose using the Liang hyphenation pattern approach adapted for clause-level structure analysis. No ML, no embeddings, no training data. speechpace-go computes delivery timing with language-specific syllable-per-minute tables, sentence-level pause modelling, and audience preset cadence curves. Both are at v0.1.0 on pkg.go.dev. Use them in your own tools. **Try it** Create a speech from the Create menu. Fork Lincoln from the library. Tell us what is missing.