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Certain words may be considered as “powerful words”, since they clarify your meaning and affect your audience's reactions and emotions.

Passion is related to credibility (see generally, Smith (2002)) and so passionate words can influence your audience's thoughts and even change the way your audience thinks. Passion can affect our actions, motivating us to certain tasks or discouraging us from other actions. The words can inspire us to perform an amazing deed, or dampen our enthusiasm and make us abandon a plan altogether.

Powerful words create strong impressions and vivid images in the minds of the hearers. They can incite feelings of happiness and friendship and love, or induce anger and hatred in the listener. Depending on the words we use and how we use them, we can attract people toward us or repel people from us. There is a very real basis to humankind’s belief in the mystic and binding power of words (Black (1962) 76).

Strong words can create striking and enduring images in the mind. Think of the words in  advertisements in the newspaper or on television. These advertisements show you how a few well-chosen words can affect your perception and your desire for a product.

Using effective words in your speech can help you impress, persuade, and even dominate people sometimes. Dedaic and Nelson (2003, 1) say that political power cannot be divorced from the power of words, and that the power of words lies in words’ ability to express the extremes of human feelings and intentions and to “direct the spear towards ‘the other’”.

Knowledge and use of powerful words are acquired through a combination of intuition and practice, rather than precise instructions. The best way is to develop your proficiency in the English language and improve your vocabulary. The more words you know, the more the chance of having valuable words at your disposal. And your expertise in language gives you a flair for identifying these words and figuring out their appropriate use.

However, there are several books, magazine and newspaper articles, journals, and Internet resources, which can help you in learning strong words and their proper use. You can look for resources dealing with the power of words in your particular field of work, such as the academy, management, and technical areas. These materials usually give advice and hints on making your speech sound more emphatic, appealing, and even authoritative to people.

Excellent sources include Harry Mills, Artful Persuasion: How to Command Attention, Change Minds, and Influence People (1999) and Michael R Smith, Advanced Legal Writing: Theories and Strategies in Persuasive Writing (2002). Another useful source is the freely available Win More Cases: The Lawyer’s Toolkit (2008) by Troy Simpson, which includes specific tips on choosing powerful words. These tips include:

• prefer action words (ie verbs) to nouns
• avoid forms of the verb “to be” (ie “is”, “are”, “be”, etc) since these words convey no action
• use people’s names rather than descriptions (eg, say “Betty Jones” rather than “the plaintiff”)
• turn negative phrases (eg, “he did not remember”) into positive phrases (eg, “he forgot”)

These and the other techniques described in scholarly and popular sources provide some quick ways to increase the effectiveness of your choice of words. But the most reliable method is to enhance your overall knowledge of the English language and vocabulary, and naturally acquire the skills of identifying powerful words and their appropriate use.

REFERENCES

M Black, The Importance of Language (1962)

MN Dedaic DN and Nelson, At War with Words (2003)

Harry Mills, Artful Persuasion: How to Command Attention, Change Minds, and Influence People (1999)

Troy Simpson, Win More Cases: The Lawyer’s Toolkit (2008)

Michael R Smith, Advanced Legal Writing: Theories and Strategies in Persuasive Writing (2002)