Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear

by Frank Luntz

It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.

You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs.

Words that work, whether fiction or reality, not only explain but also motivate. They cause you to think as well as act. They trigger emotion as well as understanding.

To the average reader, this may appear to be a difference without a distinction. For Powell, the distinction still matters—a lot. To him, decisive meant “precise, clean, and surgical,” whereas overwhelming implies “excessive and numerical.”2 The former is smart and sophisticated. The latter: heavy-handed and brutish.

The words of average Americans are at once a language of idealism and a language of common sense.

Most of us are not great leaders speaking at great moments. Most of us are businessmen rolling out our next year’s financial goals, or teachers at a state convention making the case for a new curriculum, or nurses at a union meeting explaining the impact of managed care on the hospitals in which we work. And we must have the sound appropriate to us. . . . Your style should never be taller than you are.”

For most of us, communication has never been and should never be elitist or obscure. It is functional rather than an end in itself. For me, the people are the true end; language is just a tool to reach and teach them, a means to an end. We live in an age when the world is no longer ruled as it once was by the Latin of the elites, but by the common, democratic tongues of the people. And if you want to reach the people, you must first speak their language.

When I tell a political client that a given idea is unpopular, it’s to his credit if he sticks to his principles and pushes ahead with it anyway, but I’m not serving him well if I explain away the dilemma altogether so that he’s never forced to confront that hard choice between conviction and popularity. To me, the truth matters.

Rule One Simplicity: Use Small Words

rule: Avoid words that might force someone to reach for the dictionary . . . because most Americans won’t. They’ll just placidly let your real meaning sail over their heads or, even worse, misunderstand you. You can argue all you want about the dumbing down of America, but unless you speak the language of your intended audience, you won’t be heard by the people you want to reach.

Sophistication is certainly what Americans say they want in their politics, but it is certainly not what they buy.

The most effective language clarifies rather than obscures. It makes ideas clear rather than clouding them. The more simply and plainly an idea is presented, the more understandable it is—and therefore the more credible it will be.

Be as brief as possible. Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much. When asked how long a man’s legs ought to be, Abraham Lincoln said, “Long enough to reach the ground.”

When Coolidge’s dinner guest bet him that she could make him say more than three words, he responded, “You lose”—still considered one of the best political jokes in presidential history.

Rule Three Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy

Credibility is established very simply. Tell people who you are or what you do. Then be that person and do what you have said you would do. And finally, remind people that you are what in fact you say you are. In a simple sentence: Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Rule Four Consistency Matters

Rule Five Novelty: Offer Something New In plain English, words that work often involve a new definition of an old idea.

Rule Seven Speak Aspirationally

As Warren Beatty, perhaps the best student of the human condition in Hollywood, once told me, people will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Product advertising has a higher hurdle to clear. Consumers have to see themselves in the ad and perceive a genuine benefit and value to themselves from using the product. They have to identify personally with the people in the ads in a profound way, the way you might identify with a special teacher or colleague at work.

Aspirational advertising language doesn’t sell the product as a mere tool or as an item that serves a specific, limited purpose. Instead it sells the you—the you that you will be when you use the product . . . a smarter, sexier, sunnier you. It’s not about creating false expectations, for that would diminish credibility. It’s about encouraging the message recipient to want something better—and then delivering it.

An even simpler question was posed hypothetically by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the months leading up to the 2006 midterm elections. When asked what he would tell Democrats to say in their campaign against the House Republicans he once led, Newt’s response encapsulated several communication “rules.” It was just two words, three syllables, and nine letters: “Had enough?” It needs no explanation. It needs no clarification. It simply rings true. Apparently, much of America agreed.

These, then, are the ten rules of effective communication, all summarized in single words: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context. If your tagline, slogan, or message meets most of these criteria, chances are it will meet with success. If it meets all ten, it has a shot at being a home run.

Members would welcome people to their town halls and thank them for coming just as they always had done. But instead of launching into a fifteen- or thirty-minute speech or presentation, members would first ask the audience why they came to the event that day and what they hoped to learn. And the way people would be chosen to speak was by catching the football.

The problem with far too many male politicians and executives is that they tend to make everything into a sports analogy. In my years of interviewing women from all across the country and in all walks of life, I’ve consistently found that this drives women insane. Many women (and, to be fair, also some men) don’t know what a “hat trick” is. Men use baseball metaphors, golf metaphors, football metaphors—and often these sports metaphors are graphic and violent.

Several years ago I asked Americans whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes for “further law enforcement,” and 51 percent agreed. But when I asked them if they would pay higher taxes “to halt the rising crime rate,” 68 percent answered in the affirmative. The difference? Law enforcement is the process, and therefore less popular, while reducing crime is the desirable result. The language lesson: Focus on results, not process.

Focus on results, not the process

Orwell also lays out a series of language rules. Every one of them is sound writing advice, whether you’re looking for your first job or you’ve already reached the pinnacle of corporate or political success: i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.4

FIGURE 1: CONTEMPORARY YOUTH LANGUAGE AND DEFINITIONS WORD: Bro DEFINITION: Friend WORD: Bling DEFINITION: Bright, flashy jewelry WORD: Bootylicious DEFINITION: Very sexually attractive WORD: Diss DEFINITION: To disrespect someone WORD: Fo’ shizzle DEFINITION: An affirmation of a comment or action WORD: Ghetto DEFINITION: A description of urban and/or poor culture WORD: Got game DEFINITION: Ability that earns the respect of others WORD: Hella DEFINITION: Word used to give emphasis to something. Ex: That pizza was hella-good. WORD: Holla DEFINITION: A greeting to get one’s attention WORD: Jonesing DEFINITION: An intense, overwhelming craving WORD: Mac Daddy DEFINITION: A man who gets everything he wants WORD: Phat DEFINITION: Cool, good-looking WORD: Player/Playa DEFINITION: Someone who has many relationships

OK—Spelled okay in more formal contexts, some scholars believe that it owes its origins to the 1840 presidential campaign, representing the initials of President Van Buren’s nickname, Old Kinderhook. Funny how the slang lives on even though the president who inspired it was long ago forgotten.

Dough or bread—These words have long been slang for “money.” Dough first appeared as a slang term for “money” in 1851, bread not until the 1930s or 1940s. Breadwinner, though, dates all the way back to 1818.7 It takes money to buy bread, so it’s easy to see how this usage came about. Think also of the expression/warning “knowing where your bread is buttered”—that is, the source of your livelihood.

“If I need five people in a mall to be paid forty dollars to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn’t have my job.” —ROGER AILES, PRESIDENT, FOX NEWS CHANNEL

Just as it is true that you are what you eat, it is also true that you become what you say.

Effective language is more than just the words themselves. There is a style that goes hand-in-hand with the substance. Whether running for higher office or running for a closing elevator, how you speak determines how you are perceived and received. But credibility and authenticity don’t just happen. They are earned.

Unless and until you say something to break the rhythm of a negative story, it will continue. A graphic profanity would have broken the rhythm, changed the focus, and, while a debate about the use of such words in politics would have ensued, that would have been a better debate for John Kerry.

As McKinnell himself has said, “Now is the time for real answers, not simple ones.”

But do you know the origins of the expression, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride”? Would you believe it comes from a 1923 advertisement for Listerine?5

It’s been almost thirty-five years since Richard Nixon uttered the words “I am not a crook,” thus confirming the perception in the public mind that he was, in fact, a crook. He broke a cardinal rule of political communication: never repeat a criticism as part of your rebuttal.

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Even more enlightening is the story of a single word associated with a single speech that would dog and eventually destroy the president who came to office as a response to the corruption of Watergate. I am of course referring to Jimmy Carter and his infamous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in the summer of 1979 that most of you will know as “The Malaise Speech.” Delivered almost thirty years ago, no political speech in my lifetime offers more language lessons for what not to do.

Carter withdrew to Camp David to engage in what may have been the first political “listening session” in which Americans from all walks of life made the sixty-five-mile trek to the president’s mountaintop retreat for what was essentially a ten-day-long focus group. The problem for Carter was that he listened too well, internalizing all the negativity and filtering out all the hope, and so the speech he eventually gave left everyone even more depressed.

He began by reminding Americans that he had promised to be a president “who feels your pain,” a line that will now forever be credited to Bill Clinton. But then the speech disintegrated. He spoke of “the crisis of the spirit in our country,” setting a political precedent that every downturn in anything important to the public would be labeled a crisis, and how we were no longer the nation of “the ballot, not the bullet,” that our armies were no longer “invincible,” that the economy was no longer “sound as a dollar.” Never in American history had a president attacked every essential American institution all in one speech. But it was his direct assault on American values that shook listeners to their very core. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. Having reread the speech for the first time since hearing it as a child, even I got depressed. It was a litany of despair and defeat that Americans had never heard from their president until that night. And, while he took some responsibility, the message heard by the American people was that it was America’s fault. (Remember, it’s not what you say but what people hear that matters.) The speech was a reminder not of what Americans could be if they dared to dream, but rather a declaration of what they had in fact become in tha...

Carter’s popularity and his presidency were essentially destroyed. He apparently didn’t understand rule seven of effective communication: speak aspirationally. He never realized that it is better to smile through the downpour secure in the knowledge that a rainbow is on the way than to frown and complain about the weather. And the public realized, malaise or no malaise, that he was not the man who was capable of leading them out of the storm. Playing to weakness rather than strength, Carter revealed his own crippling weakness. And the American electorate rewarded the optimism of Ronald Reagan as a result.

The famous “Dean scream” on the evening of the Iowa caucuses in 2004 fixed Dean’s image in the public mind in a way that has been impossible to undo. A transcript of the event would record a rather thorough and reasonable listing of states Dean planned to campaign in, but along with it came a sound that had not come from a presidential candidate before—or at least not caught live on every network. It was that sound, a Western yee-haw delivered with a New England twang and a guttural New York intensity, along with relentless re-airing of the video, that did him in. He had certainly delivered communication rule eight (visualize)—only in exactly the opposite way that he intended. Viewers got a chance to imagine and visualize Governor Dean as President Dean—and it frightened them.

Incredibly, the perception of extremism had little to do with Dean’s actual position on the issues or record in office. As many in the media eagerly and repeatedly pointed out, Dean wasn’t a particularly left-wing governor, at least by Vermont standards. By most objective measures of their professional careers, John Kerry was in fact more liberal than Dean.* But Dean’s persona, his rhetoric, his attitude, were much less restrained and much more volatile than Kerry’s stoic personality. Perception is everything—and the scream made Dean appear extreme and therefore unpresidential. It will also be one of the video snippets from 2004 that will be replayed every election cycle.

The trick is to approach every communication opportunity from the perspective of the audience—and always be armed with one really good sound bite. If labels are important in politics because they help us categorize and remember, sound bites are essential because they can actually change minds. Americans vote based on short bursts of political communication that are typically seven to ten seconds in length and squeezed in between a car chase and the latest panda birth on the local news—not from marathon viewing sessions of Road to the White House on C-SPAN.

In 1980 it was Reagan’s “There you go again” refrain against Carter that captured the public’s imagination and diminished Carter’s relentless attacks. In 1984, it was Reagan once again who delivered the perfectly timed sound-bite jab against opponent Walter Mondale, “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” that helped shore up an otherwise lackluster debate performance.

“My language was meant to be transparent and clear. If there was a theme, it was always to simplify, simplify, simplify, to make them feel it in their blood, get it into their skin. You have to reach people in their soul so that they internalize your message. Too many messages are just internal gobbledygook.”1 —JACK WELCH

‘Companies don’t give job security. Only satisfied customers do.’”

“I used to have coffee with the assistants and the staff once a month when we were restructuring the company, and they would ask me whether they’d still have a job after we were done downsizing staff functions. I’d tell them to look at their phone logs. If they were primarily filled with calls coming from the field with customers wanting to buy something, that’s a good sign of job security. But if the calls were coming from the corporate office to the field just to get data for me, their days may be numbered. The message I was sending was clear: their job was not to kiss our fannies. Their job is to make things, sell things and do things. I communicated quite plainly that you’d have job security if you were customer focused, and you wouldn’t if you weren’t.”

“Gambling” looks like what an old man with a crumpled racing form does at the track, or sounds like the pleas of a desperate degenerate trying to talk a pawnshop punter into paying a little more for his wedding ring, or feels like the services provided by some seedy back-alley bookie in some smoke-filled room. “Gaming” is what families do together at the Hollywood-themed MGM Grand, New York, New York, or one of the other “family-friendly resorts” in Las Vegas. “Gambling” is a vice. “Gaming” is a choice. “Gambling” is taking a chance, engaging in risky behavior. “Gaming” is as simple as playing a game with cards or dice or a little ball that goes round and round and round. This linguistic swap coincided with a genuine image makeover right in the heart of the world’s gaming Mecca.