The Emotional Intelligence of Emotional Language

This is my final blog of 2022.  What generated the idea was a recent post on Thought-Leader.com about Emotional Language.   (I am using the Thought-Leader program to help me write a TEDx talk).  The post used the picture shown and made the argument that if you want your talk to be remembered you needed to switch from rational language to emotional language and referred to seven examples in the diagram.

This is a well-known trope.  It is a common suggestion that to make your talk more compelling should use Anglo-Saxon root words rather than Latinate root words. The speeches of Winston Churchill are often quoted as excellent cases of this strategy.  ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’ is a famous example.

However not many of us have memory, learning or intelligence of Churchill.  However there is a way to simply achieve this using Word.  Take a passage that you want convert.  As you scan the passage and come across a word with three or more syllables highlight it.  (A word with three or more syllable is likely to be a Latinate word.)

Then right click on the word with your mouse and a menu will appear which will allow you to click on Synonyms.  When you click on Synonyms up will come a menu of suggestions.  Then all you need to do is click on the Anglo-Saxon word.

So for example I have long defined Temperament as your “genetic emotional predisposition.”  Scanning this phrase I highlighted “predisposition” and was rewarded with the synonym “bias.”  This is much better word to use.

So I now define Temperament as your “genetic emotional bias.”

I know this sounds trivial but there is no question that using Anglo-Saxon root words does make a passage clearer and more emotional.

There is a great quote by Marcel Proust “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  And when I started using Word to provide Anglo-Saxon root words I thought I had a new set of eyes.

A very common message in Emotional Intelligence Training Programs is improve your emotional vocabulary.  There are 4000 “emotional” words in the English Language and this is a suggestion easily made but very hard to action.  However using the Word/Synonym trick is a much easier way to achieve the same goal.

A Merry Christmas to all my readers and may you have an emotionally intelligent 2023.

This blog was first published on LinkedIn on 15 December 2022’

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/emotional-intelligence-language-christopher-golis