Convey to Compel 7 - The Senses
Evoke them to compel.
How do you learn best? By watching people do things? Maybe you’re more of a hands-on learner? Perhaps you like to read instructions instead? Why is this important?
Senses.
You know, the five senses we use to interact with the world… Leveraging them while communicating can help our words penetrate more.
Think about it: everything you experience in life happens via a cause-and-effect relationship with your five senses. Even the attention you seek from your audience depends on their senses. Them paying attention to you requires either listening or looking or both.
Therefore using language that evokes the five senses helps captivate your audience by helping them imagine your thoughts in one of these five ways:
Visual – how things look
Auditory – how things sound
Kinesthetic – how things physically and emotionally feel
Olfactory – how things smell
Gustatory – how things taste
Today we focus on evoking the first three senses: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. The reason is that we’re trying to increase how effectively we communicate concepts to people, and the vast majority of concepts cannot be fully grasped through smell and/or taste alone. However combining two or all of the kinesthetic, visual or auditory approaches to data processing will almost always let us grasp a concept fully. As such we’ll focus on using language that evokes these three senses today.
Now, for the sake of simplicity, throughout the rest of this post we’ll refer to this language that evokes our senses, as human language.
Examples of human language:
There are many words, word combinations and phrases that can stimulate our minds in a visual, auditory or kinesthetic way. Here are just a few.
Visual:
- an eyeful
- bright
- clear
- dull
- focused
- foggy
- hazy
- illuminate
- imagine
- look
- picture
- round
- revealsee
- sharp
- straight
- view
- A sight for sore eyes
- Take a bird’s eye view
- Can you picture that?
- It’s not so black and white
- Just imagine what it would look like
- Let’s shed some light on the subject
- Looks crystal clear
- See how this works for you
- Show me what you mean
- Take a peek
Auditory:
- bang
- deaf
- hush
- listen
- loud
- melody
- quiet
- resonate
- roar
- screech
- shout
- silence
- sound
- squeak
- tell
- tune in/out
- whisper
- zoom
- How does that sound?
- Let’s set the tone
- Loud and clear
- On another note
- Quiet as a mouse
- That rings a bell
- That sounds about right
- That’s music to my ears
- Tune in to what I’m saying
- Voice your opinion
Kinesthetic:
- catch
- cold
- concrete
- crush
- feel
- feeling
- firm
- freezing
- grasp
- hit
- relax
- rough
- scrape
- sharp
- smooth
- soft
- solid
- strong
- touch
- trigger
- warm
- Do you catch my drift?
- Get a grip
- Get a handle on
- Hit them with the truth
- I have a good feeling about this
- It just doesn’t sit right with me
- It’s like you’re walking on eggshells
- Let’s pull some strings
- Let’s set the mood
- Let’s stay in touch
- Reach out to us
- That feels right to me
- The pressure is off
Impact vs substance:
Now, let’s make something very clear:
Just because you use human language does not guarantee you will keep your audience’s attention. Sure, this technique may help you grab their attention initially but if your subject matter is bland, no amount of speaking techniques will keep them tuned in.
Human language is meant to be infused into already good subject matter so that it penetrates more deeply by leveraging the path of the human senses. So how do we do this?
Human vs technical language
It’s important not to overuse human language. You don’t want to be saying a lot about nothing. Try to use it to replace technical language that does not stimulate the senses, but has the same meaning as the human language you’ll replace it with.
For example, instead of saying:
This well help you understand xyz
You can say
This will help you grasp xyc
It’s important not to replace all technical language just for the sake of doing so. There are technical words whose meaning cannot be replaced with other words. Those words are jargon (see our last post). If your audience understands the jargon you’re using, then use it to make your point.
When you can replace technical language with human language of the same meaning, do it. If you can’t, don’t. Taking this approach to using language that stimulates our senses is a good way to make your audience better grasp your thoughts.