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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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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Tracy Ousdahl and Paul Pinney have traveled the globe. But sometimes, instead of venturing out to a cool destination, they use their time off to visit their families.

Don’t call that a vacation, though. To Tracy and Paul, that’s a famcation.

Half-and-half words like famcation — linguists call these portmanteaus — not only grab readers’ attention. They also move further and faster on social media. In fact, research by HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella shows that tweets containing novel words tend to get retweeted more often than those that don’t.

Smash words together like Shakespeare.

Smirch was a verb, writes Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, before Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. And impediment was in use for at least 200 years before Shakespeare came up with impede. The bard also created the words madcap, ladybug, eyesore and eyeball, among many others.

Among the first people to “neologize publicly on purpose,” Wallraff writes, were English writers Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Carroll, author of Through the Looking Glass, added chortle — a combination of snort and chuckle — to the English language.

Portmanteau comes from the English portmanteau luggage, a piece of luggage with two compartments. (Or as Carroll wrote, “two meanings packed up into one word.”)

Our language is filled with portmanteaus: smog (from smoke and fog), motel (motor and hotel) and brunch (breakfast and lunch).

How to play with portmanteau.

Ready to make like Shakespeare and coin your own word? Here are four techniques to try:

1. Create a Wordoid.

Just plug in an existing word or word fragment, click a button, and Wordoid will create a slang word for you. Here are some of the results I got when I plugged in the words edit, coach, consult, rewrite and train:

• Coachieving
• Consultimate
• Rewritering

How can you use Wordoids to make your copy more creative?

2. Combine two words like Sam Horn.

Sam Horn, the goddess of developing creative book titles, offers this process for coining half-and-half words.

• List your key words in two columns. Also consider prefixes and suffixes you can add to your key words to create new words.

Bad	+	Advocate	=	Badvocate
Chart	+	Article	=	Charticle
Glamour	+	Grunge	=	Glunge

• Review the list. Try combining at the first half of the key words in column A with the second half in column B.
• Combine the first half of the key words in column B and the second half in column A.

The result: New words like the term one of Horn’s clients came up for her book about how obesity can lead to chronic diseases. You guessed it:

Diabesity.

3. Gain inspiration from WordSpy.

Check out online tools like Verbotomy and WordSpy for novel words that surprise and delight you. Here, a handful from WordSpy:

• Apostrofly n. An errant or misplaced apostrophe, particularly one that seems to have been added randomly to the text.
• Diworsify v. To make something worse by diversifying.
• Googleganger n. A person who has the same name as you, and whose online references are mixed in with yours when you run a Google search on your name.
• Momoir n. A memoir about motherhood. — momoirist n.
• Proem n. A prose poem; a work written in prose but incorporating poetic imagery and rhythms.

By reading great neologisms, you can inspire yourself — almost program yourself — to coin more creative terms.

4. Model the masters.

Collect your favorites portmanteaus, take them apart, put them back together and find ways to create words that work for you and your topics.

Here are some of the best from my collection:

Mario shrugs smugly, a sort of smrug.

— Paul Murray, novelist, in Skippy Dies

Capitalistas: A disease of misplaced importance. Ex: The Engineer will run the Project, and the Accountant will send Invoices at the end of each Quarter.

— Sally Jacques, head of information management and investor services at Standard Bank South Africa

Profanitype:  the special symbols used by cartoonists to replace swear words (points, asterisks, stars, and so on).

— Rich Hall, writer on “Not Necessarily the News”

Dialexia: being terrible at transcribing phone numbers.

— Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives

CFNO: A CFO (Chief Financial Officer) whose answer always seems to be No no matter how large or small the purchase request. (Not to be confused with COR: Chief Obstacle Remover).

— BuzzWhack

Play with portmanteau, noodle with neologism.

Freshly minted words get more attention than tired coinages. So what words can you smash together to make new ones?

Who knows? In a couple of hundred years, it might be hard to believe they haven’t always existed. And in the meantime, they’ll make your message more engaging.

The post How to coin a new word appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

A hand shoots up in my Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.

“But,” the communicator says, “don’t you risk confusing people with wordplay?”

Well … yes, you do. And that’s part of the point.

When readers encounter wordplay, they first try on the literal meaning of the words. When that doesn’t work, they seek alternative meanings.

Because readers spend extra time and attention on wordplay (PDF), they understand it more fully and remember it longer.

And that’s just one benefit of wordplay. Among others:

1. Wordplay grabs attention.

Meet your Broca area — a small part of your brain located in the frontal lobe of your left cerebral hemisphere. It’s your body’s language control center.

You can thank your Broca for helping you sort through the 5,000 messages you get every day — that’s nearly 2 million a year — PLUS social media, without having to process every word.

Remember that old Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson?

What we say to dogs: “Okay, Ginger! I’ve had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!

What dogs hear: “Blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah.”

Your Broca is Ginger: not paying much attention to most messages — until something interesting comes along.

Well-worn phrases like “a rough day” are so familiar they don’t activate your Broca. Plain old splainin’ doesn’t do anything for it either. Why even bother decoding those words into meaning?

But puns and other wordplay activate Broca’s area.

Want folks to pay attention to your message (PDF)? Activate their Brocas with wordplay.

2. Wordplay is more fun.

Figuring out a pun is a little like figuring out a riddle or solving The New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s fun! It also feels good to figure out a twist of phrase.

Call it “the pleasure of the text,” the reward that readers get from figuring out figurative language. When readers discover the hidden meaning behind your wordplay, they congratulate themselves on their astuteness.

3. Wordplay feels good.

And when that twist of phrase tickles your readers’ funny bones, their brains deliver a dose of dopamine. Then, if you really crack up, neurons called spindle cells spread the joy across the brain.

4. Wordplay changes minds.

The good feeling readers get from figuring out puns and other plays on words also helps create a positive attitude toward your message. That puts readers in an agreeable mood and may even open their minds to your message.

In fact, ads using rhetorical techniques were 166% more likely to persuade readers (PDF) than ads that did not, according to two researchers from the California State University at Sacramento. They correlated ads with figurative language in Which Ad Pulled Best against results.

Move readers to act

5. Wordplay is more memorable.

“Words that roll off the tongue stay in the brain,” says Sam Horn, author of Pop!: Stand Out in Any Crowd.

Indeed.

Those two Sac State researchers also found that ads using rhetorical techniques were 229% more likely to be remembered than ads that did not.

And, in another study, four researchers had half their participants read alliterative passages and other half read plain-old passages. Those who read the alliterative passages remembered more of what they’d read than the control group.

Play to win.

Want readers to pay attention to, enjoy, remember and act on your messages? Try wordplay.

___

Sources: “Awesome Alliteration Analysis Posits Power Of Poetry And Prose,” Scientific Blogging, July 30, 2008

Cristen Conger, “Is there a scientific formula for funny?” How Stuff Works, June 7, 2011

Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez, “The use of wordplay in advertisements published in men’s magazines: a comparative study in the UK and Spain” (PDF), Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 2012, vol. 20, pp. 11-36

David Glen Mick and Edward F. McQuarrie, “Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language” (PDF), Journal Of Consumer Research, March 1996

Stefan Kjerkegaard, “Seven Days Without a Pun Makes One Weak: Two Functions of Wordplay in Literature and Literary Theory,” Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011

Gail Tom and Anmarie Eves, “The Use of Rhetorical Devices in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Research, July-August 1999

Leo Widrich, “The Science of Storytelling,” Daily Good, Feb. 21, 2013

The post Why wordplay works in communications appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

My grandma and namesake, Annie B. Vrana, was an Oklahoma farm woman and one of the most colorful people I’ve known. When she spoke, she painted pictures in your head.

What I didn’t know then that I do know now is that word pictures increase understanding. Because Grandma talked in pictures, we could literally “see” what she was saying.

Here are some of my favorite Grandmaisms. See how she made concepts concrete by turning ideas into things.

What’s wrong with this gene pool?

Now my sister, Lynn, is sounding a little like Grandma. Here are some of the colorful phrases she uses at work:

• Let’s hunt where the ducks fly.
• I did some quick napkin math …
• I’ll shake trees and see if I can get an answer.
• We need to brush out the hairballs on that poodle.

How can you make your communications clearer and more interesting by turning your ideas into word pictures?

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