Priming Your Audience: The Power of Words

In this day and age when people are more inclined to communicate through emails, text or instant messages, choosing the right words is important. Words have the ability to uplift and inspire.

They also have the power to cut someone to the quick or ruin lives.

When we speak to children, we choose our words carefully. We may not be so careful with other adults. Even your vanity license plate could have an impact on its readers.

What do license plates have to do with writing? Read about the “License Plate Lady,” Caroline Miller, on Psychology News Daily. Caroline wrote an interesting article on how words affect people and their moods, all stemming from her habit of collecting snapshots of unique vanity license plates.

Caroline says: “It’s been studied in many settings how important our environment is to our well-being, and part of that is what we happen to read in signs, books, newspapers, or even on television.

One interesting study showed that test subjects who unscrambled anagrams with words like “wisdom,” “retired” and “Florida” walked more slowly out of testing rooms than people who unscrambled anagrams with neutral words, for example.

And students at the University of Wisconsin who subliminally viewed words like “decision” were more likely to have formed opinions about a subject than people who were subliminally exposed to neutral words, and then presented with a scenario that required a judgment.”

As writers, we’re aware of the impact a given word has on our audience. Our words have an incredible amount of power. It’s our responsibility to wield words wisely. Take the time to consider not only the quality of your writing, but what you’re saying to your audience.

This applies to your writing, but being careful with your words also applies to your email address, domain name, business name, blog name, and anything else with words.

Consider what kind of emotional response you want from your readers. Do you want to make them laugh? Do you want them to get excited? Do you want to reduce them to tears or make them run away screaming? Like attracts like; but it can also repel.

Negative words fuel more anger (just take a look at some of the flame wars you see in comments). Kind words might change the mood of a comment thread, someone’s day, or set off a pleasant chain of events that might reward you in ways you’d never imagined.

---