Turns out a Southwestern Tex-Mex salad by any other name would not taste as good.

Vivid menu descriptions — “applewood-smoked bacon,” “Maytag blue cheese” and “buttery plump pasta,” for instance — can increase restaurant sales up to 27 percent, according to research by Brian Wansink.

Furthermore, diners feel more satisfied after eating a Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad than after eating the same salad with a blander name.

So why do these adjectives sell while others just get in the way?

Deliver real meaning.

Adjectives work when they deliver real meaning and not “the illusion of meaning without its substance.”

Roger Dooley, blogger at Neuromarketing, suggests using adjectives that are:

• Vivid. “Freshly cracked,” “light-and-fluffy,” “handcrafted,” “triple-basted” and “slow-cooked” paint pictures in the readers’ minds. Those pictures are more compelling than, say, a plain, old omelet.
• Sensory. I, for one, want my bacon applewood smoked. Descriptions like this engage the readers’ senses.
• Emotional or nostalgic. “’Aged Vermont cheddar,'” he writes, “evokes images of crusty New England dairymen rather than Kraft mega-plants.” “Boodie’s Chicken Liver Masala” and “Grandma’s zucchini cookies” also evoke emotion and nostalgia.
• Specific. “Wild Alaskan” salmon conjures up “visions of vigorous, healthy fish swimming in pristine, unpolluted streams,” he writes.  A diner can dream, can’t she.
• Branded. I strongly prefer Maytag, Stilton and Roquefort to plain old blue cheese … even though I’m not that clear on the difference.

Change the picture.

Bottom line: Sprinkle in a few adjectives when they’ll change the picture in the reader’s head or otherwise engage the senses. But don’t use modifiers — gorgeous, great, groundbreaking — that just take up space.

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How do you organize a compelling feature?

Model this piece, which Loring Leifer wrote for Northern Funds’ marketing magazine, Northern Update. In it, the Wylie Communications head writer and senior writing coach includes all of the elements you need to craft a compelling feature story.

Headline

Start with a feature head. A creative feature deserves a creative headline. Wordplay works beautifully for this one.
Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

Bridge the gap

Deck

Summarize the story in your deck. Clever headlines grab attention, but they don’t fully explain the story. So write a summary deck in 14 words or less.

May-December marriage? Here’s how to span the age divide and retire together

Lead

Show instead of tell in a feature lead. Feature leads are concrete, creative and provocative. In this example, compression of details gets the piece off to a good start.

Long before Tim Robbins hooked up with Susan Sarandon, 12 years his senior, William Shakespeare, at 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway.

Background

Broaden the story in the background section. Here, you explain why we’re covering this story now, give broader context for the piece and fill in the details readers need to understand the rest of the story.

(Loring also included a sidebar, which explained in detail the special financial problems challenges confronting May-September couples.)

Nut graph

Put the story into a nutshell in the nut paragraph. Here, you tell people what you’re going to tell them.

Body: Section one

Avoid the muddle in the middle: Organize the body of your feature-style story into clear, complete parts. Then use subheads to label the parts for your readers.

See how Loring writes like a roller coaster. That is, she weaves metaphors, examples and concrete details throughout the piece to keep readers’ interest.

Body: Section two

Although this is a linear feature, Loring uses subheads, bullets, bold-faced lead-ins and other display copy. These make scanning easier and lift ideas off of the page.

Body: Section three

Notice how Loring has developed her bridge analogy in the display copy. One key to using an extended metaphor is to do so lightly. If Loring used a bridge reference in every paragraph, we’d soon grow weary of the analogy.

“By being realistic upfront about what is possible for the future, you can ward off putting your younger spouse in a detrimental situation… and alone,” she says.

Conclusion

Finally, draw to a close in the conclusion. The conclusion has two parts:

1. The wrap up, where you tell readers what you’ve told them. Again, note the concrete details here and throughout the piece.

2. The kicker, where you leave a lasting impression with concrete, creative, provocative information. Here, Loring returns to and spins her bridge analogy for a satisfying final note.

So you may be part of a bridge to a longer life for the next generation.

How can you craft a feature-style story like Loring’s?

Get the word out with clear, compelling copy

Each day, your readers are bombarded with 5,000 attempts to get their attention. That’s nearly 2 million messages a year. Is your copy getting through to your tired, busy, distracted audience?

These days — when people are more inclined to discard information than to read it — you need copy that captures attention, cuts through the clutter and leaves a lasting impression.

Wylie Communications can help. With Wylie Communications on your team, you can:

• Deliver copy that sells. When Ann’s not writing or editing, she’s training other writers. Or helping companies get the word out to their audiences. She applies the best practices she develops for her training and consulting business to her writing and editing projects. So your project will cut through the clutter, lift your ideas off the page or screen and deliver copy that sells products, services and ideas.
• Bring award-winning talent to your project. Ann’s work has earned nearly 60 communication awards, including two IABC Gold Quills. Let us help you produce world-class business communications, as well.
• Get writers who get business. Ann has interviewed George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. But she really enjoys chatting with economists, engineers and surgeons. At Wylie Communications, we’ve written about communication technology for Sprint, about personal finance for Northern Trust and — despite the fact that Ann’s preferred form of exercise is the hike from recliner to refrigerator — about fitness medicine for the Mayo Clinic. We’ll get up to speed on your industry, quickly and thoroughly.
• Stop working weekends. Our team provides a virtual staff to write and edit newsletters and magazines for Saint Luke’s, Northern Trust, State Street/Kansas City and Sprint. Let us pick up the slack in your department, too.

Now let’s see yours! Please post or link to your original inverted pyramid and revised feature in the comments section.

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“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Study after study shows that when you add interesting, concrete details to your message, people remember them — sometimes to the exclusion of less fascinating, more abstract ideas.

But the power to attract may also distract readers from your main idea. If your “seductive details” don’t illustrate your key points, they can:

• Draw attention away from more important ideas (Luftig & Greeson, 1983)
• Disrupt text processing (Garner, Gillingham & White, 1989)
• Cause readers to forget the important information while remembering the interesting stuff (Baird & Hidi, 1984)

“Interesting but unimportant information frequently disrupts the learning of more important ideas,” writes Suzanne Hidi, associate member, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science.

‘The seditious dealings of seductive details’

Indeed, say two researchers at Texas A&M University.

Ernest T. Goetz and Mark Sadoski reviewed the literature on “the seductive detail” and found these problems with that assumption.

So are readers being “bewitched by distracting details, bothered by incoherent text or bewildered by incomprehensible abstractions?” the researchers ask.

Not on your watch. Instead of adding irrelevant but colorful details, illustrate your important points with relevant concrete details. Make the important interesting, and people will remember your message — main points as well as colorful details — for far longer than if you bored them to death with important abstraction.

Avoid ‘Visual Vampires.’

Call these interesting but unimportant elements “Visual Vampires.” That’s PreTesting’s term for images that attract audience members in television ads but that don’t draw them to the product.

PreTesting is a Tenafly, N.J., company that gauges consumers’ reactions to ads by measuring their “saccadic” eye movements, or how fast their eyes vibrate.

Ads featuring men with wacky, red, pigtail wigs (Wendy’s), dogs wearing dentures (Citi) and an exotic woman stretching (Hormel) all grabbed attention. But they failed to keep it long enough to for viewers to read the copy or hear about the products.

Build an argument.

So take a tip from Hemingway. Ask, are your creative elements architecture, helping you build your argument? Or are they interior design, just putting wallpaper over your message?

If they’re interior design, they could be distracting readers from your key ideas. Instead, support your abstract, important ideas with concrete, interesting material.

Remember: It’s not enough to make your copy interesting. Our job is to, in the words of James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, “make the important interesting.”

___

Sources: Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Winter 1990, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 549-571

Kenneth Hein, “Beware of Visual Vampires, Warns Measurement Firm,” Brandweek, Nov. 26, 2007

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First there was FUBAR: F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition. Now, thanks to the Urban Dictionary, we also have PHOBAR: PHOtoshopped Beyond All Recognition. (Like this.)

I know; I know: Acronyms can make your copy harder to read. After all, it’s hard for readers to follow your train of thought when they’re drowning in alphabet soup.

But acronyms can also make your copy easier to read and remember, writes Jack Napoli, if you use them to group your key ideas “into nuggets of distinction.”

‘Nuggets of distinction’

MARC, for instance, is easier to remember than Mid-America Regional Council. It’s also easier to remember than an acronym that doesn’t spell something out — MRC, for instance, for Midwestern Regional Council.

Acronyms also help readers remember lists. Richard Saul Wurman, for instance, uses the acronym LATCH to outline five ways to organize copy:

• Location
• Alphabet
• Time
• Category
• Hierarchy

I recently made a mnemonic for the six types of concrete detail that grab attention and communicate your key ideas. The resulting acronym — FEASTS for the senses:

• Fun facts, juicy details
• Examples, for instances
• Analogies
• Startling statistics
• Testimonials
• Stories

How to create an acronym

Here’s how I did it … and how you can do it, too:

• List the words you want to include. You might need to find potential substitutes.
• Type the first letter of each word into the Online Anagram Server box.
• Click “get anagrams.”

Test your acronym.

To make sure your mnemonic makes your message easier to understand, Napoli suggests keeping your acronyms:

• Short: three to six characters long
• Meaningful: Make sure the acronym complements the subject matter.
• Repeatable: easy to say and remember

Napoli asks: “Can the audience recall your message in 2 minutes, 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks or 2 martinis later?”

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Hey, we know. Thanksgiving was so November 2015. But we couldn’t resist sharing these delicious holiday messages from two of our brilliant clients.

Go specific, not general.

So what if you don’t have a Cousin Bobby, your Grandma doesn’t knit and nobody in your family would touch a Werther’s with a North Pole? The writing pros at Toyota know that specifics, not generalities, engage readers.

So how did Toyotans respond?

“We have been FLOODED with positive feedback,” writes Nan Banks, senior manager of Strategic Planning for Toyota Motor North America, Inc. “I swear, about half the folks who have opened it have responded with good comments and thank-yous! I think it is our best effort to date to engage team members in sharing social content and in giving our readers content they can really use.”

Which came first, the turkey or the egg?

My brilliant clients at Whole Foods not only write concrete, creative copy about raw turkey and unmashed potatoes — they do it year after year and make it fit on a sticker. Here are some of their messages from a recent Thanksgiving:

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Metaphor is more persuasive than literal language: It’s been proven in the lab.

Make that 41 labs over more than 50 years.

Or so say Pradeep Sopory and James Price Dillard. The two researchers reviewed 41 data-based studies on the persuasiveness of metaphor published between 1952 and 2006. Then they analyzed the studies to determine what made metaphors more or less persuasive.

Bottom line: Metaphors are more persuasive than literal messages, Sopory and Dillard found.

But why?

Six theories of metaphor’s persuasive power

For more than 30 years, scientists have been trying to figure out what makes metaphor more persuasive. Sopory and Dillard outline six perspectives on metaphor and persuasion in roughly chronological order:

1. Pleasure or relief

Metaphors compare two things that seem at first to be totally dissimilar. In The Emperor of All Maladies, for instance, Siddhartha Mukherjee writes:

That makes metaphors a linguistic puzzle. When readers encounter the metaphor “Some cancer cell mutations are passengers; others are drivers,” they go through three stages:

• Perception of error. Readers realize the literal meaning doesn’t make sense.
• Conflict or tension. Readers seek the metaphorical meaning.
• Resolution. Readers find the metaphorical meaning.

Depending on which linguist you’re talking to, that resolution causes readers either pleasure or relief. And that pleasure or relief reinforces not only the metaphorical meaning, but also the position your metaphor illustrates.

2. Communicator credibility

Communicators who use metaphor, this theory goes, are more credible than those who use literal language.

Why?

• Metaphor makes you look smart. “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor,” Aristotle wrote in the Poetics. “It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”
• Metaphor makes them feel good. Metaphor points out previously unknown similarities between things. That’s a source of interest or pleasure to the reader. Impressed by the source of this newfound information, the reader sees the communicator as more credible.

3. Reduced counterarguments

In this view, figuring out the metaphor takes up so many cognitive resources, the reader doesn’t have enough brainpower left to figure out a counterargument.

4. Resource matching

A more sophisticated view of the cognitive resources theory, this theory states that all the thinking we do to figure out a metaphor makes us understand the argument better and remember it longer.

BUT — and as PeeWee Herman says, there’s always a big but — that only works if our cognitive resources match the metaphor.

Can’t understand the message? Less likely to be persuaded.

Understand the message all too well, because the metaphor is a cliché, maybe? Less likely to be persuaded again.

Think of resource matching as the Goldilocks of these theories: For it to work, it must be just right.

5. Stimulated elaboration

The math of metaphor works like this:

A (target) is B (base).

Thee (target) is a summer day (base).

Figuring out metaphors stimulates more thinking about the relationship between the target and base. And that evokes a richer set of ideas than literal language. When those ideas are in agreement with the argument, readers are more persuaded.

6. Superior organization

This view claims that metaphor helps us structure and organize our arguments better than literal language. Plus, the metaphor helps readers link and process our arguments.

The result: Our arguments are more coherent, so people understand them better, and that leads to increased persuasion.

And the winner is …

Superior organization, the researchers say. Metaphor helps us highlight and organize our thoughts. And that makes it easier for people to understand and agree with our positions.

But whatever the reason, the bottom line remains the same: Metaphor is more persuasive.

Why not make a metaphor today?

___

Source: Pradeep Sopory and James Price Dillard, “The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A Meta‐Analysis,” Human Communication Research, January 2006

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People who read metaphors are more likely to understand what someone else is thinking.

Or so say Andrea Bowes and Albert Katz, two researchers at the University of Western Ontario (London).

The researchers performed several experiments in which participants read either metaphors or literal language. Those who read the metaphors were more likely to:

• Read people’s feelings just by looking at photos of their eyes
• Come up with more, richer ideas
• Perceive characters who used metaphor as closer and more emotionally intense

“There is a unique way in which the maker and appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another,” said philosopher Ted Cohen.

When you share a metaphor, Cohen said, you issue “a kind of concealed invitation,” which your reader “expends a special effort to accept,” resulting in a shared understanding and new common ground.

Want to build common ground? Make it a metaphor.

___

Source: Andrea Bowes and Albert Katz, “Metaphor creates intimacy and temporarily enhances theory of mind,” Memory & Cognition, March 2015

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If you were … say … a brilliant oncologist and a spectacular writer, and you wanted to tell the story of cancer in a way that people who weren’t brilliant oncologists could understand and enjoy it, what literary tools might you use?

Siddhartha Mukherjee pulls out the stops in The Emperor of All Maladies. He uses storytelling, human interest, wordplay — and some killer etymological insights — to make his biography of cancer fascinating and accessible.

I promise to keep writing about Mukherjee’s book until you beg me to stop. But in the meantime, let’s look at how he uses analogy to make the science of cancer clear and compelling:

‘Like tiny clenched and unclenched fists’

Much of cancer research boils down to observing and reporting. Mukherjee uses analogy to give readers a peek into the microscope:

Analogy is key to good description. Mukherjee uses it to help us see key figures in cancer’s history:

And this analogy helps me envision the dexterity of an early anatomist:

‘A shiver down the hospital’s spine’

In addition to letting us see people, places and things, analogy can also let readers know what something feels like. In this passage, Mukherjee makes emotion tactile through metaphor:

Note how Mukherjee syncs to the subject, elegantly plucking this analogy from the world of medicine and placing it in an emotional landscape:

‘One-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk’

Comparison is also a great tool for taking the “numb” out of numbers, or making statistics more relevant and interesting. In this passage, Mukherjee’s comparisons dwarf the funds raised for cancer research:

And in this one, he demonstrates how affordable a once-precious medicine became:

‘More perfect versions of ourselves’

Because they compel attention, metaphors add power to your points. In this passage, analogy drives home the point that Mukherjee’s impressive training left him ill equipped for his cancer fellowship:

I know that cancer cells spread quickly. But this analogy makes me think about cell division in a new light:

Mukherjee’s analogy here makes a point beyond familiar hospital gown jokes:

This metaphor makes leukemia vivid …

… as this one makes its destruction clear:

“A monster more insatiable than the guillotine …”

‘Convenience stores for the medieval anatomist’

Sometimes Mukherjee’s analogies are just good for a laugh:

‘The king of terrors’

Several of Emperor’s analogies come from medicine itself. Doctors and researchers developed them as they saw or experienced things they’d never seen or experienced before.

Mukherjee passes them on so the reader, too, can see or experience them in passages like this:

And this:

Finally, of course, the title of the book itself is an analogy. For it, Mukherjee quotes a note a 19th-century surgeon once scribbled about cancer in a book’s frontispiece: “the emperor of all maladies, the king of terrors.”

How can you use metaphor to clarify complex concepts?

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Analogy makes your benefits more tantalizing by making them more tangible. So use metaphor and simile to make your concepts concrete.

ING Direct, for instance, makes its mortgage process more alluring with this analogy for its competitors’ approach:

“A mortgage application that can take just 25 minutes. It’s a mortgage application, not a thesis on quantum physics.”

And Confused.com makes its discounts more tempting by making them more concrete with this promise:

“Save a guitar on your car insurance.”

To make your benefits more compelling, make them concrete.

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All these years later, I’m still grateful for the Kindle app on my iPad.

I thought the thing I’d love most about reading on my devices would be the extra mini-fridge-sized space it leaves in my luggage for necessities like thick Marimekko sweaters and airport-sized Fazer chocolate bars that I collect on my trips. But the truth is, my favorite feature is “My clippings,” a tool that transforms my highlights and notes into text that I can transfer to my laptop.

After a couple of months of reading on a reader, I decided to review my clippings. What I found will help me — and, I hope, you — model the masters, or steal techniques from some of the year’s best writers to make your own writing more creative and compelling.

Use metaphor, not modifiers.

One problem with modifiers — thin, lean, straight — is that they don’t paint pictures in your readers’ heads. Instead of simply describing your subject with adjectives and adverbs, engage your readers’ senses with analogy.

That’s what Lorrie Moore did in this passage from A Gate at the Stairs:

Meg Gardiner used the same technique to describe a charismatic religious leader in her Edgar Award-winning mystery, China Lake:

But Colum McCann may be the master of this approach. His National Book Award-winning novel, Let the Great World Spin, includes passage after passage of description through analogy:

(And how do you like that for a 121-word sentence that works?)

Find yourself writing an adjective or adverb?

Model the masters

Regardless of your reading technology, modeling the masters is one of the best ways to improve your writing every day. When you find a passage or phrase or word you wish you’d written, clip it, study and master the technique yourself.

The better your reading, the better your writing.

What’s in your clippings?

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