Magic Words

A Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the author outlines the recent advances brought by linguistics to communication techniques. A discipline revolutionized by the automatic processing of languages: thanks to Big Data and artificial intelligence tools, we can now measure the concrete effects of every last word. And the results are astonishing: minute variations—replacing a word with a synonym, favoring a given expression, etc.—can radically improve a message’s effect. After working on a rich and diverse language corpus—press articles, executive speeches, lawyers’ pleadings, readers’ and moviegoers’ reviews, transcripts of first dates, etc.—the author details six categories of words that make the difference in empowering interlocutors, expressing assertiveness, emotions, one’s similarities or differences, etc. The recommendations are bolstered by explanations of the underlying psychological mechanisms, as well as the research that has enabled their identification. A fascinating and instructive book.