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I think often when speaking or writing, we think a lot about what we want to communicate. The high level, big ideas we want to talk about in a presentation or write in an email. We think a lot less about the specific words that we want to use when communicating those ideas. When speaking, for example, we want to fill in that conversational space, so we talk a lot about what’s top-of-mind. But it turns out that’s a mistake, because subtle shifts, adding a couple letters here, changing a word there, can have a big effect on our impact. And so, the key question for me is what are those magic words, and how can we take advantage of their power?
Two Revolutionary Trends
So there are two key trends over the last couple decades that have really revolutionized our study of language. The first is just the availability of data. It used to be that if you wanted to, let’s say, analyze customer service interactions, or phone calls, or conversations between people, you had to record those conversations. You had to transcribe them by hand. And it took a lot of work. Now, millions, if not billions, of people every day post their opinions online on social media. And so there’s so much data available about language than there’s ever been before. That’s the first trend.
Second, there’s so many new tools that allow us to analyze this data in an automated way. Now you can throw thousands of articles into a piece of software really quickly, and it spits out statistical answers that you might be interested in. We can do things like analyze a quarter of a million song lyrics over 60 years to study misogyny in music. We can do things like parse vocal features of customer service interactions or what holds attention in online pieces. And we can use it to uncover some amazing insights.
Data-Driven Insights
Language does a couple things. First, it impacts the audiences that receive it. The language we use in our advertisements impacts whether people buy things. As salespeople, the language we use in our pitches impacts whether clients do things. The language we use talking to our spouses, and friends, and our kids impacts whether those people do one thing rather than something else.
But language doesn’t just impact, it also reflects. It says things about the people, the organizations, and the groups that communicate with that language. Understanding what language is used can help us understand whether someone’s likely to be lying or not, or whether an online review is likely to be fake. As companies and organizations, we can use people’s language to predict whether they’re going to fault on a loan, or whether they’re more likely to be promoted versus fired in the next six months. We can learn things about other people, and ourselves, from the language that we and others use.
Six Types of Magic Words
There’s a science behind how language works and how we can use it more effectively. The good news is it’s not random, it’s not luck, and it’s not chance. In fact, my research has identified six key types of language, types of words, that we can use to increase our impact. To help us remember what those are, I put them in a framework called the SPEACC framework.
The S is for the language of Similarity and Difference. The P is for the language of Posing Questions. The E is for the language of Emotion. The A is for the language of Agency and Identity. The first C is for the language of Confidence. And the second C is for the language of Concreteness.
And if you’re sitting there going, “Well, wait a second, speak ends with a K, not two Cs,” you are exactly right. I wasn’t clever enough to come up with an acronym that ended with a K. Though I was informed that K is the most difficult letter to use in Scrabble, and so I don’t feel as badly about it. But if we understand these six types of language, if we understand how these six types of magic words work, we can increase our impact both at home and at work.