Choosing the best words
This TED talk by Elora Hardy can teach us the importance of great word choice in order to be persuasive. Calling forth mental images, activating the senses, asking your audience to think thanks to rhetorical questions, all of these maintain your listeners engaged and, dare I say, entranced during your talk. Magical houses, made of bamboo communicates the idea that we can create durable and shockingly different houses from a very sustainable material. But our point here is that the way the speaker takes you on a trip full of imagery and sensation is quite remarkable. It helps that the images in her presentation are impressive, of course. But notice the following: 1) The incredible precision in description: how does she describe the bamboo? The houses? The building process? Which leads us to... 2) The adjectives in particular. How often does she use vague adjectives like "good" or "interesting"? What adjectives does she use instead? 3) The use of questions t...