The power of small words

I read an interesting article the other day about what our use of little words can reveal about us.
Our Use Of Little Words Can, uh, Reveal Hidden Interests.

The article talked about how the author was at a speed dating event and became fascinated by the volume of sound - all those words in one place, then about what the people were saying. The author spoke to a psychologist, James Pennebacker, who is interested in our use of pronouns and function words (e.g. The. This. Though. I. And. An. There. That. ...). 

People generally don't listen to pronoun & function words, and most writing coaches will tell you they don't read them either. We know they're there but we let ourselves skim them. People focus on the important words. This allows us to process information much faster.
e.g I was in a swimming competition and I won first prize. -- the words the listener is interested in are: swimming competition won first prize. 

So if we mostly ignore these words, what was Pennebacker's interest? What he found after years of research was quite revealing. First let's look at what he learnt as it relates to speed dating. 

"Specifically, what Pennebaker found was that when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. ... 

This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. 

"When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically."

What about more generally...

Pennebaker has counted words to better understand lots of things. He's looked at lying, at leadership, at who will recover from trauma.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

"It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I."

What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

To demonstrate this, Pennebaker pointed to some of his own email, a batch written long before he began studying status.

First he shares an email written by one of his undergraduate students, a woman named Pam:

Dear Dr. Pennebaker:

I was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester. I have enjoyed your lectures and I'velearned so much. I received an email from you about doing some research with you. Would there be a time for me to come by and talk about this?

Pam

Now consider Pennebaker's response:

Dear Pam -

This would be great. This week isn't good because of a trip. How about next Tuesday between 9 and 10:30. It will be good to see you.

Jamie Pennebaker

Pam, the lowly undergraduate, used "I" many times, while Pennebaker didn't use it at all.

Now consider this email Pennebaker wrote to a famous professor.

Dear Famous Professor:

The reason I'm writing is that I'm helping to put together a conference on [a particular topic]. I have been contacting a large group of people and many have specifically asked if you were attending. Iwould absolutely love it if you could come... I really hope you can make it.

Jamie Pennebaker

And the return email from Famous Professor:

Dear Jamie -

Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the conference. The idea of a reunion is a nice one ... and the conference idea will provide us with a semiformal way of catching up with one another's current research.... Isn't there any way to get the university to dig up a few thousand dollars to defray travel expenses for the conference?

With all best regards,

Famous Professor

Pennebaker says that when he encountered these emails he was shocked to find that he himself obeyed this rule. He says he thought of himself as a very egalitarian person, and assumed he would never talk to people differently because of their status.

In fact, since this article first ran, Pennebaker has used his big data computer analysis to look at a wide range of new questions.

He's become a kind of literary detective, using the program to determine if a lost play was written by Shakespeare. (Results of that search should be published soon.)

He's also trying to figure out if function words can predict students' performance in college through an analysis of 25,000 admissions essays.

And he published an entire paper on the use of the filler words — um, like, uh, I mean and you know. One of the things that he found was that the use of these words — in addition to their function of annoying older people — was associated with conscientiousness.

Pennebaker has several other projects underway as well — using our simplest words as a window into our souls.

Fascinating stuff - I recommend the whole article

The Evolution of Type

We had one artist last week, this week I thought I would look at another: Andreas Scheiger. Artist Andreas Scheiger has created a wonderful exhibition in honour of type/lettering (call it what you will), the medium through which so many have communicated their ideas through the years. That allows us to preserve our history and separates from our pre-literate ancestors.

From his Exhibition:
"Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things. indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention.(...) A letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it."

When my eyes crossed this excerpt of famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy´s "The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering" (1918) suddenly letters full of life showed in my mind´s eye. Letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy! I drafted this cognition in a chart for print and in order to prove my finding to the interested audience I took one step further. I surgically opened the letters S, Z, S, A, W and how contented I was to discover muscles, veins, tendons and bone just like the ones shared by so many living creatures.

Below are some of his wonderful sculptures that give a visceral evolution to letters.
You can see more here.

The power of words - police report

Words can be very powerful tools. Think of the subtle differences between disguise, mask, camouflage, and conceal - all so similar, yet they conjure different images in our minds, conjure different emotions. As a writer word choice can be both conscious and unconscious, we want to draw our readers into the story as deeply as possible, but we want to guide their emotional journey.  We use words as signposts as to which characters to love, which to hate, what situations are about to be dangerous.

However, it's not only fiction writers that understand the power of words, even in writing designed to be cleansed of all emotional response word choices have power. One place where that can be made clear is the police report, as evidenced here: The Art of the Police Report.

Police departments have strict rules governing reporting writing (and a report must be written on every incident). "Crime reports are written in neutral diction, and in the dispassionate uni-voice that’s testament to the academy’s ability to standardize writing. They feel generated rather than authored, the work of a single law enforcement consciousness rather than a specific human being."

"An incident report tells only what happened: where, when, and to whom. It offers multiple perspectives of the same event from often contradictory points of view of cop, victim, suspect, and witnesses. An incident report lists the inventory of all physical evidence collected and booked. Anything from shell casings and rape-kit underwear to a three-legged dog in a custody dispute.
In structure, an incident report is a strict chronological narrative. It begins with a Source of Activity section, which tees up the story. It’s where the narrator introduces himself and offers his credentials for telling this tale: On 4-6-10 at approx. 1922 hours, my partner Ofcr. Brown (badge #13312) and I (Ofcr. Martinez badge #14231) were in full uniform traveling westbound on Gage Avenue when we received the radio call of an LUAC in progress at 82nd St./Central Ave."
 You get the picture... 

In the article the author, who reads hundreds of incident reports a day, talks about how one cop uses words to evoke an emotional response through inflection and narrative voice (It's worth reading the full article). "Officer Martinez writes incident reports that technically follow the academy’s guidelines. He avoids modifiers and descriptors. He traces the physical action of an event without opining or speculating. He offers accounts that contradict his own findings. He’s succinct and factual. He tells the literal and empirical truth. He writes in the dispassionate narrative uni-voice that conveys objectivity and distance. So why is Martinez instantly discernable on the page from a hundred other cops?"

Let's go through an example:

"At a Lewd Acts on Child crime scene, Martinez’s partner, Brown, writes, “The Victim sustained multiple injuries.” Martinez would tell us, “The baby was bleeding from three orifices.” There’s a world of difference here. Brown gives us a victim; Martinez gives us a baby. Brown offers a fact; Martinez paints a picture. Brown’s statement moves us forward; Martinez makes us stop dead and envision the horrific crime that caused such injuries. Both statements are neutral on the surface, but the specificity of Martinez’s language makes the reader see and feel.

At the same crime scene, Brown says, “We placed the Suspect in a felony prone position and took him into custody without incident.” Martinez would write, “We cuffed the father.” Martinez’s version reminds us of the unnatural aspect of the crime, that a father (presumably) committed it. He edges near the academy no-fly zone with father in place of suspect, but gets away with it because the sentence describes police action—the cuffing—rather than any actions of the suspect. Also, nobody disputes the fact that the suspect is the father; it’s the type of father he is that’s at issue.

At the same crime scene, Martinez might note that there’s “no food in the apartment.” This is an empirical fact, so technically admissible. It doesn’t speak to the specific crime of Lewd Acts on Child, but it does subtly add to the moral charges against the parents. Martinez inflects the barren apartment and makes it speak. Details bring scenes to life. Sometimes the image can tell everything.

In the witness section of the report, Brown might say, “Victim’s mother gave no statement.” Martinez would tell us, “Mother refused to cooperate.” This carries a totally different emphasis and meaning. Martinez doesn’t speculate if she’s protecting her husband at the expense of her child. He doesn’t need to. What kind of mother refuses to speak when her baby is bleeding from three orifices?

Examine these two versions of the same incident, side by side. They admit the same facts. They’re both truthful. But one—Martinez’s—is also persuasive. Why? It’s subtly inflected in every line to signal its agenda. Though it labors under the constraints of the report format, it uses emphasis and diction to suggest how we interpret what it tells us. It may look impartial, but it’s aimed like a weapon."

And there you can see the power of words. So next time you're writing something down, fiction or simple a report for work, think about your word choices.