Writing With Emotion to Engage Readers

Source: Sébastien Le Clerc/Public Domain

How often have you heard decision-makers say, “Just give me the facts.” The assumption? The “facts” alone–delivered without emotion–convey the whole story.

But experiments by psychologists and neuroscientists have long suggested otherwise. The data show that emotion figures into all communication.

That’s because people first seek out and prioritize the emotional meaning embedded in the language. They process the emotional content in about 200 milliseconds. The rest of the meaning gets processed in 400-plus milliseconds.

The feeling becomes understood before facts, even subtle feelings. That’s the way evolution wired our brains. When we comprehend, we combine the “hot” component of processing (emotion and feeling) with the “cold” (facts and logic). That’s how we come up with the full meaning.

Hot processing often dominates, too. And it retains the upper hand well after the cold processing. It doesn’t matter if people are reading or listening. Nor does it matter where they live on the planet or how they grew up. We’re all wired to let emotion hog our attention.

Experiments with the “attentional blink” suggest how much. We ordinarily miss attending to some of them when we listen to a long list of words. We can’t help it because of the limits on human attention. We “blink.” There’s an exception, though: We don’t blink if the words are charged with emotion–fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, or happiness.

This means that, when composing your words, you best consider their emotional connotation and denotation. Choose the language in which the emotional component dovetails with–or amplifies–your intended meaning.

The Right Emotion

That’s not to suggest you should write with fire and ice. Sometimes, “getting emotional” in language is appropriate—if, say, you’re penning op-eds. But skillfully choosing words freighted with the pertinent feeling—the feeling that clarifies what you want to say—assures that people get your message properly.

Ignoring the emotional component is hazardous when it comes to decision-making. Pioneering psychologist Amos Tversky and a team did a classic experiment that shows the impact of getting the feeling wrong: They gave Harvard Medical School physicians statistics on outcomes for lung cancer treatments. The data came from two sets of patients, some who had surgery, and some who had radiation. The doctors were to decide which treatment was preferred.

Roughly half the doctors got data as “probability of living” after treatment. The rest got the same data as the “probability of dying.” Same data; one the inverse of the other. The result? The doctors’ answers depended not on the data alone. Their judgment pivoted on whether the wording implied a happy (living) or sad (dying) emotion. The most revealing finding: “The attractiveness of surgery, relative to radiation, was substantially greater when…the problem was framed in terms of the probability of living rather than in terms of the probability of dying.” The doctors let the emotional color of even everyday words propel the most critical kind of analytical decision.

Feelings, as it turns out, win over our hearts and minds. Geeks, bleeding hearts, doctors, artists—you name it—we’re all equipped with the same comprehension quirks. We give top billing to emotions, knowingly or not. And we do so even with the most mundane words.

Emotional Risks

Which makes you wonder: What if the words aren’t mundane? What if, during a critical decision, they’re emotionally loaded? An example: Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University tested how two groups of people reacted after reading a text on crime. The text described the fictional city of Addison, where crime was flourishing. One version of the text referred to crime as a “beast,” the other a “virus.”

The effect was mind-blowing: Once people finished reading, they were asked to recommend an intervention to reduce crime. The readers from the “beast” group largely advocated using harsher enforcement to catch and jail criminals. The “virus” group largely proposed researching root causes and enacting preventive social reforms. The data and text were identical, except for the swapping of “beast” and “virus.”

Amazingly, when asked if the emotionally laden word influenced their judgment, the people in both groups said no. They claimed they relied solely on the data. Just as surprising, their political leanings didn’t matter much. What mattered was the emotional charge of the words.

The takeaway? If you aim for clarity in decision-making, you can’t succeed without putting emotion—the right emotion—into your choice of words, phrases, and figures of speech. How will people process both the hot and cold? That will determine the complete meaning.

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In my research for Writing for Impact: 8 Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Readers’ Brains, three tactics stand out for getting the emotional temperature right in everyday writing.

• Have attitude. Convey conviction. If you’re working on a message you care about, choose words to show it. Get readers to feel what you feel. You don’t have to whip people up. But you want to make sure the “script” of your message and “score” of emotion resonate as one.
• Frame feeling. Take your cue from Tversky, Thibodeau, and Boroditsky. Choose words and phrases that frame your feeling correctly. Guide readers down the right path. Your emotional frame, as much as your logical one, will dictate what people comprehend.
• Move with metaphor. Why use a metaphor if a literal expression says the same thing? Because metaphors invariably convey emotion and, in turn, allow you to convey your meaning more forcefully. Research confirms it. Imagine advising someone on how to do performance appraisals. You could say, “Praise the person first to soften the impact of finding fault.”

Or you could, as Dale Carnegie did in How to Win Friends and Influence People, say, “Beginning with praise is like the dentist who begins his work with Novocain. The patient still gets a drilling, but...”

Think of it this way: People consume language in the same way they consume food. If they were consuming a sundae, they would blend the hot fudge and cold ice cream on their palates to get the full effect. The two ingredients, united, would make the experience. The same is true in writing.