There are several ways that written language can sway a reader beyond the literal meaning of the words. Two examples are:

  1. The vibe of the words. Are the words positive or negative? My working assumption is that a reader will tend to have a more positive opinion of a passage of text when it uses confident, positive words.
  2. The structure of the words in a passage of text. Is the most important stuff at the very top? It is common for people—especially time-limited journal editors or hiring managers, say—to skim a document and form an overall assessment based on that skim (detailed information in this excellent book).

I think using both #1 (positive words) and #2 (putting the most important stuff at the top, and keeping it brief) can help project confidence and make a passage of text more persuasive. My PhD supervisor (Prof Sean Connell) calls this “success grammar”. I think this is an excellent term, but I have no idea where he got it from!

This is most frequently relevant when I’m addressing peer review comments. e.g. rather than responding to a reviewer by saying “We agree that ABC was lacking, and we have tried to include more of XYZ.”, I prefer to say “Comment addressed. We have added new ABC, which ensures that the paper is now XYZ.”

  • The words “lacking” and “tried” are negative, but “addressed”, “added”, “new”, and “ensures” are positive.
  • And the second formulation wastes no time saying what the problem was, which was really unimportant—the point of this passage of text is to convince the editor/reviewer that the comment has been addressed, so this is the very first phrase that the reader will see.
  • Though note that the literal meaning of the words both formulations is actually the same!

Other positive words are “empower”, “can” (as opposed to “must” or “should”), “encourage”, “motivate”, “optimism”, “identify”, “opportunity”, and “create”.

(For my more general thoughts on scientific and technical writing, I do have two papers on this! here and here.)

(Side note: The positivity or negativity of words is a really interesting topic of study. One example, certainly not from my own work, is the Hedonometer, a mathematical measure that uses word usage as an input and can provide a real-time measure of the happiness or sadness of entire social networks like Twitter! A few years ago they actually hooked this measure up to a big glowing sphere in a museum in Adelaide, which would glow blue when Twitter was happy (Christmas) or red when Twitter was sad (2016 US election).)