Five Winning Plays to Say It With Style

How often do you think, “I wish I could write or speak with style?” Who doesn’t want to come across as cool? Who doesn’t want to play their hand with flair?

But when you make your play, what amplifies your impact as a stylist is not appearing fashionable—it is stimulating in people a more intense neural engagement. That’s how you persuade people, get them to think outside their boxes, get them to act.

Source: Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung CC0 1.0 DEED

When you choose to play your style cards, you have dozens of tricks to choose from—tone, imagery, figures of speech, and more. Which ones rank on the shortlist for a surefire payoff?

There’s no scientific answer. But research shows that five basic elements prove their worth as measured by brain activity. All of them are easy to practice and amplify activity not only in the brain’s sensory, motor, and other circuits. They also fuel the brain’s reward circuit.

A caution: Before you try to score style points, work your message into fit form, trim and taut. After you’ve conditioned your body logic, you can build on it to intensify your lines of reasoning. If you drape style elements onto flabby logic, you’re likely to highlight your message’s ungainliness.

So, per my last post, beware of ornamenting your message with mere bling, which risks adding sparkle without substance. Craft instead those elements that prove their worth, as demonstrated by how they capture attention, pique emotions, and elicit insights.

1. Play With Words

The first winning style play is to replace plain words with vivid ones. If you’re like me, you’re almost always going to start by choosing the first clear word that comes to mind. That’s normal. But then ask yourself: Can I find a more exacting and unexpected word—or a mix of words—that expresses more pointedly what I want to say?

Selecting the right words has always been elemental to the masters of style. Here’s Charles Dickens as he describes a man on the street: “His neckerchief [was] like an eel, his complexion like dirty dough, his mangy fur cap pulled low upon his beetle brows…..” [i]

Less-than-common word combinations—neckerchief and eel, dirty and dough, beetle and brows—they form novel images, vivid, and exacting. They impart genuine style.

And why does that engage? Because readers and listeners continuously predict your next word and phrase.[ii] When you surprise them—with words or anything else—their brains pay extra attention, which can initiate the release of dopamine and natural opioids in the reward circuit.[iii]

The lesson: Once you know what you want to say, find more stylish words to improve how you want to say it.

2. Play With Sensations

Like Dickens, you can also reap the benefits of style by playing with sensations. Just now, you probably experienced some unique ones: the feel of eely slipperiness, the smell of doughy skin, and the sight of bristling beetles.

Which points to the second winning play: Choose words and phrases to activate sensory, motor, and visual neurons. The goal is to have what you say mentally processed in the same neural circuits as sensations in real life.

Here’s Rudyard Kipling: “…and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas….” [iv]

And here’s Western writer Zane Grey: “I observed then that the lizard had his jewel eyes upon the bee; he slipped to the edge of the stone, flicked out a long, red tongue, and tore the insect from its honeyed perch.” [v]

When you read Kipling and Grey, you reenact the actual sensory experiences—albeit subtly. This is a reminder when you’re composing to play to all five senses, not just the “picture” people have in their heads.

3. Play With Sound

A third winning style play is to convey meaning through sound. Some words convey meaning via onomatopoeia (click, bang, splash, boom).[vi] You use them all the time to just that effect. But many others convey meaning via sound in ways researchers don’t completely understand.

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Ever notice how verbs and nouns for shiny things often begin with “gl”? Glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glimmer, glass, glitz, gloss, glitter. Somehow, the gl and other sounds you might once have called meaningless—l and r are other examples—have specific connotations.[vii]

In 2023, Bodo Winter at the University of Birmingham led a team that cataloged over 14,000 words whose sounds evoke meaning.[viii] Some may convey that meaning by eliciting emotion. For example, research shows people associate r with harsher emotions.[ix]

Here’s novelist Zora Neale Hurston at a cabaret: “This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks….” [x]

You, like Hurston, can take advantage of sound when you use your “ear” to write since you’ve learned the magic of sound since you were a kid.

Playing with recurring sounds is another way to add style—recurring consonants, syllables, and word endings. The ensuing drumbeat—in phrases, sentences, or within paragraphs—establishes a pleasing rhythm and makes the sentence easier to read. See my post on alliteration.

You don’t need the skills of a poet to take advantage of this. Here’s dermatologist Marty Lyman writing about skin: “The sun harms, but it also heals.” And: “We can feel defined and confined by our own skin…” [xi] The first sentence uses alliteration, the second, assonance.

Literary masters use alliteration all the time. Here’s F. Scott Fitzgerald as he ends The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” [xii]

4. Play With Repetition

People also like recurrence when it comes to the repetition of words and syntax. Research shows that one sentence primes people to more quickly grasp a succeeding one with the same structure. The repetition allows people to read faster and with more pleasure.

Here’s writer Anne Lamott: “Seventh and eighth grade is about waiting to get picked for teams, waiting to get asked to dance, waiting to grow taller, waiting to grow breasts… More than anything else, they were about hurt and aloneness.” [xiii]

You probably found the recurrence of “waiting” pleasing. Notice how it also hints at Lamott’s meaning—the feeling of being repeatedly delayed.

And here’s Frederick Douglass in 1852: “For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder… The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed….” [xiv]

That syntactic repetition—prime and repeat—can have the power of a one-two punch. Abolitionist Douglass no doubt knew what he was doing.

5. Play With Analogy

The fifth winning style play is the use of analogy. Few style elements deepen meaning more. The most profound insights often come when someone compares a thought or thing we can’t quite grasp to another one that we do.

Metaphor gets the most credit for its analogy power. Here’s Virginia Woolf as she walks along a river: “On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.” [xv]

Simile often works just as well. Here’s D.H. Lawrence: “Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all round.” [xvi]

And here’s the classic primer on negotiation, Getting to Yes: “Like two shipwrecked sailors in a lifeboat at sea quarreling over limited rations and supplies, negotiators may begin by seeing each other as adversaries.” [xvii]

Five basic elements of style. Five elements worth practicing to have more impact as a communicator. Just remember to craft them not just as fashion frills. Craft them to highlight the well-sculpted body of your meaning. Use your flair with words to showcase the fitness of your message, not to reveal your fixation on cool.