Win People Over With Genuine Style in Your Writing

There’s one piece of advice few writing coaches would quibble with: Keep it simple. Simple wording speeds readers’ and listeners’ mental processing. It coaxes them to hang onto your words. Researchers have demonstrated the rewarding impact of simplicity over and over.

But it’s not always better to communicate with simple words and phrases. You can often go one better with artistic elegance and linguistic smarts, rewarding people doubly with novel expression. That’s true even though, paradoxically, literary-like elements often make language processing harder.

Read how author Eric Weiner expresses himself as he explains how “wonder” differs from “curiosity”: “Curiosity is restive, always threatening to chase the next shiny object that pops into view. Not wonder. Wonder lingers. Wonder is curiosity reclined, feet up, drink in hand. Wonder never chased a shiny object. Wonder never killed a cat.”[i]

The Rose Archive at Shenkar College CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED

Simple and stylish. Weiner forces you to slow down to process the metaphor, allusion, and personification. As you slow, you extract more meaning. Your brain’s reward circuit in turn pumps out more dopamine. Increasingly engaged, you’re persuaded to read more of what he says.[ii]

Of course, all else being equal, you’re still going to win over readers and listeners by sticking with simple exposition. Who doesn’t like communication that speeds the mind through the job of language processing? But worthy elements of style, which catch readers’ attention along the way, can provide whistle stops of extra reward.

Stylish Standards

The human brain loves elements of style if they resound with unexpected meaning. The surprise of that meaning fires neurons in the left-hemisphere’s Wernicke’s area, the classic language-processing region. But it also fires neurons across the brain.[iii] That extra firing is the source of extra impact.

Whenever you write or speak, of course, you have your own background style—personal tone, diction, syntax, point of view. But when you communicate using style elements consciously, you can better hook people

Style elements run the gamut in their variety: Sounds that convey meaning. Images that illustrate points. Metaphors that clarify concepts. Repetition that triggers emotion. Allusion, hyperbole, and irony that enrich and create context.

The challenge is to differentiate kitsch from quality. What kind of style element does little more than accessorize your prose with bling? And in contrast, what kind propels meaning to a new level? Cheap “mind candy” titillates people, but does it keep them coming back for more?

Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran gives an example of how to differentiate cheap from choice elements of style. Think about the difference between the impact of puns versus metaphors. To “get” a pun, you have to make superficial cross-brain associations. To get a metaphor, you have to make deeper and more distant ones.[iv] The deep associations, not the shallow ones, generate genuine literary magic.

It doesn’t take literary genius to produce that magic. For example, a reporter writing about a decidedly unstylish subject, recent movement in the stock market, penned, “This was supposed to be the year value stocks shined. Then AI mania took over and ran away with the spotlight.[v]

A metaphor. Your brain sounds the whistle to slow down to take in its implications. As you infer deeper associations, you extract more meaning.

Slower but Sure

Researchers have quantified the slowdown effect on the brain. David Miall and Don Kuiken at the University of Alberta found in reading experiments that, in fiction passages high in elements of style, people read syllables with a mean time of 354 milliseconds. In passages low in elements of style, they read them in 162 milliseconds.[vi]

When people’s brains detect worthy style elements, in other words, they take a second (or millisecond) look to see what they might be missing.

Miall and Kuiken also found that people slow almost instantly. They detect the stylistic features in fiction in as little as 155 milliseconds. And that’s before the window of consciousness.[vii]

Attention Essential Reads

The Necessity of Multitasking

Your Attention, Please!

Again, all else being equal, listeners and readers prefer the payoff of orderliness and predictability in language. Why go to extra processing work if you don’t get payoff? The reason is that when people recognize an unfamiliar turn of phrase in a style element, they take the unfamiliarity itself as a signal. It prompts them to search for those far-flung connections that heighten meaning.

In another part of their research, Miall and Kuiken asked readers to score fiction passages for “strikingness.” They found that passages requiring longer reading times—longer owing to style—ranked higher.[viii]

English writer Samuel Johnson foresaw this kind of ranking centuries ago. In 1787, he noted the “most engaging” act of a writer: “New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.”^[ix]

Joan Didion gives us an example in writing about self-respect. “Without it,” she wrote, “one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”[x] Didion was justifiably legendary for her style.

Lead With Feeling

The unfamiliarity of style elements also engages people by eliciting emotion. Miall and Kuiken found that the passages with greater “strikingness” triggered more reader-experienced emotion. It was the emotions, they theorized, that guided readers’ search for meaning.[xi]

Stylish word choice alone can trigger emotion. Arash Aryani and others mainly from the Freie Universität Berlin studied the individual sounds of words. Words with short vowels and hissing sounds, for example, make people feel more aroused and negative. This, they suggested, explains why the word “piss” is ruder than “pee.”[xii]

Our association of particular sounds with particular emotions starts early in life. Even nine-year-old kids associate single words with emotions. They can identify words evoking joy or feelings of beauty.[xiii]

Just how powerful are style elements in driving emotion? Winfried Menninghaus and others at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany found that style elements in German poetry intensify all emotions. Elements featuring repetition, for example, (e.g., repetition of consonants) intensify joy, sadness, and being moved.[xiv]

Join the Aha Generation

A third way elements of style engage people is by helping them arrive at an insight.

Neuroscientist Ramachandran argues that artistic elements trigger mini-aha sensations. The aha comes as people piece together incoming stimuli into bigger wholes. “Each time a partial fit is discovered, a small “Aha!” is generated in your brain,” he writes. “In this view, the goal of art is to create images that generate as many mutually consistent mini-‘Aha!’ signals as possible…”[xv]

In your own experience, you’ve probably discovered what Ramachandran is talking about. Here’s Willa Cather as she uses a style element, an analogy, to whistle you to a stop: “The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”[xvi] You have to slow to process the meaning, but as you do, a pleasant mini-aha pops in your brain.

Of course, when you use an element of style, you always risk complicating people’s comprehension. Readers and listeners may close the book on you if you don’t offer a genuine payoff. So it’s always worth asking: Am I offering a worthwhile tradeoff for the added processing?

From a scientific point of view, you now have three criteria to guide you in that decision. Does the element grab attention? Does it stir emotion? Does it generate a mini-aha?

The goal, of course, is to more completely engage readers. Will the style element get your readers to recline, drinks in hand, to wonder at your message? No genuine bonus in meaning, no reason to whistle people to a stop.