WORDS THAT WORK

HYPERION

Contents

Chapter One

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all." -Winston Churchill "When we disregard the rules altogether we get anarchy or, worse yet, Enron." -political humorist Bill Maher

Rules govern our daily lives. Some of these rules are explicit, imposed by government: "obey the speed limit," "no parking," "April 15 is tax day." But most are informal, often unspoken cultural norms-rules of politeness, rules of conduct in the business world, rules of interaction between people. Most are commonly understood traditions that have built up over time, habits so ordinary that we usually don't even think about them.

Unfortunately, not all such involuntary habits and subconscious conventions are positive or productive. American business and political communication is rife with bad habits and unhelpful tendencies that can do serious damage to the companies and causes they seek to promote. Just as in every other field, there are rules to good, effective communication. They may not be as inflexible and absolute as the rules against speeding or avoiding your taxes, but they're just as important if you wish to arrive safely at your destination with money in your pocket.

The rules of communication are especially important given the sheer amount of communication the average person has to contend with. We step out of our houses each morning into a nonstop sensory assault: advertising and entertainment, song lyrics and commercial jingles, clipped conversations and abbreviated e-mails. A good deal of noise also comes from inside our homes, from our TVs to our sound systems to our computers and now our iPods. How do you make people hear your words amid all this chatter? "Great language has exactly the same properties as great music," says Aaron Sorkin, the brilliant writer/creator of the hit television drama The West Wing. "It has rhythm, it has pitch, it has tone, it has accents." So in a cacophonous world, how do you ensure that your musical note stands out?

This chapter seeks to examine the principles behind good communication and, in the process, to discourage some of the most common bad habits that plague everyone from senators to CEOs. The ten rules I offer, identified through a career devoted to real-world research, are equally valuable in ad agency conference rooms and political war rooms (and, for that matter, in conversations with an angry spouse or an anxious teenage daughter). When applied, they give rise to language with color and texture. Language that gets heads nodding. Words that pop, the kinds of words and phrases you only have to hear once before they burn themselves into your mind and drive you to action. In short, these ten principles give rise to words that work.

First, allow me a few caveats. This chapter and this book are not concerned with words that are beautiful, words that are timeless, or words that are ideal in some abstract, philosophical sense. Rather, it is concerned, again, with words that work-language of everyday utility, language that generates practical results. My concern is with the unadorned, commonsense language of small town, middle America, not the intellectual gamesmanship of the ivory tower. It's with language that has bubbled up from the American people themselves.

There is certainly a time and a place for high-flown, literary language. But to capture a listener's attention the language doesn't need to be urbane or erudite-or use words like, well ... urbane or erudite. It does not necessarily need the uplifting, ennobling tone of Ted Sorenson (John F. Kennedy's friend and speechwriter) and Peggy Noonan (gifted scribe for Ronald Reagan), the two great speechwriters of our time. The lofty language of Sorensen and Noonan transcends ideologies and generations, moving listeners just as much today as when their words were first spoken by others decades ago. Noonan was once asked to reflect on the craft of wordsmithing and speechwriting, and I think she had it right:

Most of us are not great leaders speaking at great moments. Most of us are businessmen rolling out our next year's financial goals, or teachers at a state convention making the case for a new curriculum, or nurses at a union meeting explaining the impact of managed care on the hospitals in which we work. And we must have the sound appropriate to us.... Your style should never be taller than you are."

In an ideal world, everyone would have all the knowledge they need, a home library, and our political discourse might take place on the elevated level of a Lincoln-Douglas debate or at least The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. People would not speak simply, in concise sentences, but obtusely, in dense paragraphs full of tremendous detail, classical allusions, and subtle theoretical insights-more like Bill Buckley than Bill O'Reilly.

That might be a comforting fantasy, but it isn't reality. For most of us, communication has never been and should never be elitist or obscure. It is functional rather than an end in itself. For me, the people are the true end; language is just a tool to reach and teach them, a means to an end. We live in an age when the world is no longer ruled as it once was by the Latin of the elites, but by the common, democratic tongues of the people. And if you want to reach the people, you must first speak their language.

My second caveat concerns the limits of language. Democratic strategist George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor by trade and a linguist by design, has argued that left-wing ideas would have been plenty popular with the public if only they had been "framed" with the right narratives and metaphors. But this ignores the screamingly obvious: Some policies and ideas really are more popular than others-no matter how they are articulated. Language is tremendously important-after all, politicians and an increasing number of corporate warriors live and die by it-but it's not everything. Language alone cannot achieve miracles. Actual policy counts at least as much as how something is framed.

When I tell a political client that a given idea is unpopular, it's to his credit if he sticks to his principles and pushes ahead with it anyway, but I'm not serving him well if I explain away the dilemma altogether so that he's never forced to confront that hard choice between conviction and popularity. To me, the truth matters. My job, as I see it, is to remain agnostic on the underlying philosophical issues and keep my personal opinions from infecting my work. It doesn't matter what I think about tax policy or welfare or the minimum wage. Sure, I have opinions, but they remain just that-my opinions. People hire me to tell them, as objectively as possible, what the general public believes on those issues, and why. They want the truth as it is, not as I wish it to be.

You would be amazed and angry if you knew just how little respect the typical pollster, PR guru, or advertising executive has for your opinion. The Republican pollster who gave America Senators Jesse Helms and Al D'Amato once said to me, and I quote, "I don't care what the people think. I only care what I think." A media consultant to three presidents warned me never to "fall in love" with my clients or the people they represent. "They're all flawed."

Perhaps I take a different approach. Before you can create, and certainly before you judge, you have to listen to people and respect them for who they are and what they believe. Just because you may not ultimately accept or endorse someone's subjective perceptions is no excuse for refusing to acknowledge that they exist. I have sought to listen to the American public-not just hear, but truly, actively listen. It is informed not just by raw data but by intuition and experience. It is empirical more than theoretical, emotional as well as rational. The process is really quite simple. Through national telephone surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, content analysis, and simple day-to-day interaction with people, I learn the language of America. In fact, what you eventually hear either from your elected representatives or in ads for the products and services you use is often spoken first by you and then translated by me.

I'll say it again: What matters is not what you say, but what people hear.

THE TEN RULES OF SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION

Rule One Simplicity: Use Small Words

William Safire, William F. Buckley, and the people who solve the New York Times crossword puzzle will resent this first rule: Avoid words that might force someone to reach for the dictionary ... because most Americans won't. They'll just placidly let your real meaning sail over their heads or, even worse, misunderstand you. You can argue all you want about the dumbing down of America, but unless you speak the language of your intended audience, you won't be heard by the people you want to reach.

Simplicity counts. The average American did not graduate from college and doesn't understand the difference between effect and affect. Sophistication is certainly what Americans say they want in their politics, but it is certainly not what they buy. Newt Gingrich is arguably one of the smartest political figures of the past fifty years, yet his overtly intellectual, philosophical approach-which to opponents sounded bombastic and sanctimonious-turned many people away.

Al Gore and John Kerry, legitimately bright individuals with Ivy League backgrounds, suffered the same fate. Where an average critic of the Bush administration could attack its foreign policy for "going it alone," John Kerry felt the need to offer "a bold, progressive internationalism that stands in stark contrast to the too often belligerent and myopic unilateralism of the Bush Administration." Huh?

Similarly, Al Gore told audiences that he longed for the days when "vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another," but then went on to attack the "abhorrent, medieval behavior" of the Bush administration-in the very same speech. Neither Gore nor Kerry understood that the ideas you might hear in a Harvard seminar will simply not ring true with the stay-at-home mom in Kansas or the department store salesman in Cincinnati.

In fact, using a long word when a short one would suffice tends to raise suspicions: "What is this guy trying to sell me? Does he have an ulterior motive?" The most effective language clarifies rather than obscures. It makes ideas clear rather than clouding them. The more simply and plainly an idea is presented, the more understandable it is-and therefore the more credible it will be.

The same principle holds true in the corporate sphere. From Campbell's Soup's "M'm! M'm! Good!" to the "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" of Kellogg's Rice Krispies, product taglines that are so simple and uncomplicated that even kids can remember them are the ones that prove most memorable to their parents as well. It is no accident that the most unforgettable catchphrases of the past fifty years contain only single- or at most two-syllable words. And when they initially haven't been so simple, someone inevitably has stepped in to shorten them. Just ask the makers of the Macintosh ("Mac") computer. And when's the last time you used the words "International Business Machines" rather than "IBM"? Federal Express is now officially "FedEx," Kentucky Fried Chicken is now "KFC," Oil of Olay is just "Olay," and Dairy Queen now refers to itself as "DQ."

This public preference for simple words and acronyms is also reflected in pop culture. For example, take a look at the movie titles at your local multiplex. All the way back in 1991, the movie Terminator 2 started a trend of truncation when its title was cut down to T2-from five syllables down to two. In the years that followed, Independence Day was abbreviated to ID4 and Mission: Impossible III became M:i:III, just to cite two prominent examples. Many movies have begun dropping the word the from their titles, as well. The 1976 movie The Bad News Bears was remade in 2005 as simply Bad News Bears, and The Wedding Crashers became just Wedding Crashers.

Even our day-to-day behavior itself has been simplified. We now live in a text messaging world. Teenagers "text" (a newly coined verb for SMS communication) each other all day long, and the twenty-first-century businessman is attached to his BlackBerry like the farmer of the eighteenth century was attached to his plow. Tapping away with one finger on a miniature keyboard to create a message on a tiny screen isn't exactly conducive to multisyllabic SAT words.

Neither is e-mail, for that matter. We process so much more visual and audible information than ever before, that it's no surprise many of us don't have the patience (not to mention the education) to tease out the fine nuances and connotations of a lot of ten-dollar words. At work and at home, in business and in our personal lives, we're actually writing more than ever before-but what we're writing looks less like an old-fashioned letter and more like what you'd see on a vanity license plate.

These changes didn't come about by accident. Good things really do come in small packages-and from small words.

Rule Two Brevity: Use Short Sentences

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." -Mark Twain

Be as brief as possible. Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much. When asked how long a man's legs ought to be, Abraham Lincoln said, "Long enough to reach the ground." The best ad-makers and creative artists understand this notion of appropriateness, and they wisely avoid going overboard. Like Goldilocks in the story of the three bears, they look for the phrases that aren't too big or too small, but "just right." This is less about self-restraint than it is a matter of finding exactly the right piece of the language jigsaw puzzle to fit the precise space you're trying to fill.

The most memorable political language is rarely longer than a sentence. "I like Ike" was hardly a reason to vote for the man, but the simplicity of the slogan matched the candidate and the campaign. Not many people considered Calvin Coolidge a great president, but to this day we still remember "Silent Cal" for his brevity. When Coolidge's dinner guest bet him that she could make him say more than three words, he responded, "You lose"-still considered one of the best political jokes in presidential history. When the prolific British writer G. K. Chesterton was asked for an essay on the topic "What's Wrong with the World?" he wrote: "Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton." And we've all heard the story about the college philosophy student given the exam question "Why?" who simply responded, "Why not?" Each of these short answers said far more than a thousand-word essay or Castro-like speechathon would have.

Similarly, they say a picture is worth a thousand words ... or is that ten thousand words? Researchers have traced the origin of that phrase to Fred Barnard, an advertising manager in the 1920s. When selling ad space on the sides of streetcars, he used the words "One look is worth a thousand words" to suggest that images are more potent than text in advertisements. At first Barnard claimed the saying came from a Japanese proverb, but shortly thereafter he changed it a hit, to "One picture is worth ten thousand words," and instead credited a Chinese proverb. Some quotation dictionaries now accept Barnard's claim of Chinese origin, and over time this saying has often been credited to Confucius. The origin really doesn't matter, but the rule certainly does. If one visual can say more than a thousand or ten thousand words, use it.

Sometimes two or three words are worth more than a thousand. The most memorable taglines in product advertising are usually not much more than fragments. From the day in 1914 when Thomas Watson joined IBM, then known as the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company, and coined the phrase "think" to communicate the value of the company, some of the most powerful and provocative messages have come in very small packages. "Easy as Dell" effectively communicated the ready-to-use functionality of one of the world's most successful personal computer companies. "The UnCola" memorably declared to consumers exactly what 7-Up was ... and was not. If you ask anyone from age five to 65 what cereal is sold based on the slogan "They're grrreat!" they'll tell you Frosted Flakes. "Got Milk?" has been wickedly parodied by every late-night talk-show host, but it helped make the product cool again. And at three words, three syllables, and eight letters, Nike's "Just do it" packed more power, word for word, than any footwear ad ever-and helped cement a global sporting goods empire.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WORDS THAT WORKby FRANK LUNTZ Copyright © 2007 by Dr. Frank Luntz. Excerpted by permission.
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