When the Federal Trade Commission needed to explain why the agency has decided not to develop a do-not-spam registry — officials feared that spammers would target people on the list — a spokesperson said:

“You’ll be spammed if we do — and spammed if we don’t.”

How can you craft such a good pun or play on words? One approach is to list, rhyme and twist. Here’s how:

1. List.

Write down the key or topic words from your article.

Then expand your list. The more words, the better. Try synonyms, antonyms and different forms of your keyword — spam, spams, spammed and spamming, for instance.

Visual Thesaurus and OneLook Reverse Dictionary are great tools for adding words to your list.

2. Rhyme.

Use rhyming dictionaries to find words that sound similar to your keywords. My favorite is RhymeZone.

Keep looking. RhymeZone doesn’t recognize “spammed.” But it did send me to OneLook Dictionary Search for words ending in “ammed.” (Input “*ammed.”)

I searched for one of them — slammed — back at RhymeZone, which gave me this list: crammed, dammed, damned, jammed, rammed, scammed.

Next, find phrases that include those rhyming words at Phrase Thesaurus or ClichéSite.com. In fact, I found another starting point for the FTC sound bite by doing this research:

Publish and be damned.

3. Twist.

Now substitute your key word for the rhyming word. Make it:

Publish and be spammed.

List, rhyme and twist in action.

This approach can result in headlines covering …

… The Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton ranking best hotel in the United States in a reader poll:

How the Ritz Was One

… A couple of new movie theaters being built in the same neighborhood:

Coming soon: Two theaters near you

… Turbulent Spanish elections:

New Reign in Spain

… A consultant hiring a personal trainer after he hit a plateau working out on his own:

My muscles, so to speak, had grown accustomed to the pace.

… A blistering (and bearish) week in August:

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Economy

The launch of Playboy.com:

Silly Rabbit, These Clicks Aren’t For Kids

Choose fluent words.

The best words to play with are fluent words — that is, they’re short (one syllable’s best), sweet and easy to pronounce.

That’s why the first step in wordplay is to expand your word list by finding related words. For a story on how to manage your inheritance without making common missteps, for instance, the word in my head was “inherit” — not very fluent. So I ran it through OneLook Reverse Dictionary and landed on the word “heir.”

Now, “heir” may be one of the best words to play with in the English language. That’s because “heir”:

• Is a homophone that sounds like err and air. That makes it easy to sub a soundalike, like:

Err apparent

• Looks as if it sounds like hair, which makes it easy to list and twist:

Bad hair day

• Rhymes with dozens of words, including care, dare, fair, pair, prayer, rare, scare, share and their — all good candidates for listing, rhyming and twisting.
• Looks as if it could be pronounced here, which allows more listing and twisting:

Heir today, gone tomorrow

• Is short, sweet and easy to pronounce.

Don’t wait for the muse.

Some lucky communicators are natural-born phrase twisters. I have to substitute systems and processes for talent.

If you’re like me, list, rhyme and twist key words in your next story for a sassy sound bite or surprising headline.

The post How to write puns: List, rhyme and twist appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When Perceptive Software needed to fill 130 positions — more than one-third of its existing workforce — in just three months, a contradiction in terms was just what the company needed.

Perceptive communicators created a campaign to show that the company — a midsized document management software engineering firm based in Shawnee, Kansas — was hip, hiring and a great place to work.

Shawnee and … hip? For a woman who was raised in this Kansas City suburb, that sounds like an oxymoron. But despite its location, Perceptive is cool, what with its cutting-edge software, Wii “decompression” chambers, on-site dodgeball court and slide from the second to the first floor.

That’s a paradox. So paradox, or oxymoron, became the theme for Perceptive’s campaign.

Contradiction in terms

Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms — think “deafening silence,” “wise fool” or “cruel kindness.”

The best oxymorons emphasize contrasts, incongruities or the complex nature of reality. “Oxymoron” is Greek for “sharply dull,” so the word is itself an oxymoron.

For nearly 40 years, researchers have been showing that paradoxes in advertising:

• Draw attention to a message and may enhance persuasion
• Give readers a sense of accomplishment and are thus intrinsically rewarding and pleasurable
• Seem “surprisingly true” — and might astonish people into changing their attitudes and beliefs

The Perceptive communicators built their campaign around oxymorons — from the company’s career site URL to its billboards, radio spots and T-shirts. Here’s a sampling of the copy:

The Perceptive communicators were using one of Roy Peter Clark’s top 50 writing tips: Use modifiers to change the meaning of the word, not to intensify it.

“‘Killing Me Softly’? Good adverb,” The Poynter Institute senior scholar writes in Writing Tools. “‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.”

How to write an oxymoron

You can use this approach, too, for your own copy, concept or campaign:

• Determine your key word or phrase. Let’s call it “prima donna.”
• Find contradictory modifiers or verbs via Visual Thesaurus (via RevUpReadership.com), OneLook Reverse Dictionary or your own beautiful brain. “Timid,” maybe.
• Put them together (timid prima donna) and — voila! — you’re off.

The results

It’s one thing to be creative, of course, and another to generate serious business results. Among its successes, Perceptive’s campaign:

• Drew 3,055 résumés via the website — an increase of 408% over the same period the previous year
• Filled 135 positions — five more than the original goal. That was three more during the four-month campaign than the company had filled during the 12 months before the campaign
• Came in at 8% under budget
• Earned lots of buzz from the media, adoration from Perceptive executives and a PRISM award from Kansas City/PRSA

Bottom-line creative. There’s nothing oxymoronic about that.

___

Sources: Jason Stella and Stewart Adam, “Tropes in Advertising: A Web-based Empirical Study,” Southern Cross University, 2005

“Oxymoron,” Wikipedia

The post Why do we use oxymorons? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..