The Secret to Evoking Emotions in Writing: Why ‘Crying’ Beats ‘Sad’ Every Time
“She was sad.” Boooorrrrring.
Talk about telling not showing. Something so important as emotion and yet, most of the time we reduce it to the lowest common denominator, literal use of the word; angry, sad, happy.
How about this instead; “she was crying.” It shows, it describes. And for most of you, it likely invoked the sadness emotion. You instinctively and knowingly associate the crying verb with sadness.
These emotion actions are not just any old actions or any old verb. They convey meaning tied to our personal, shared experience. These words have superpowers. They activate internal feelings and states. For example, Justice is understood and easily invokes joy or frustration or dismay tied to a jury verdict.
This abstract linkage of words to emotions is no different than concrete words like “pen”, which immediately conjures up an image of what a pen looks like. But, their superpower doesn’t stop there. It turns out that these abstract concepts are mentally processed faster than concrete words. “Crying” beats”sad” for mental processing ease and association.
Creating mental ease is important if you want to write well and tell stories well. And emotion in writing matters. But, as we’ve written 1,000 times (make it 1,001), people don’t give because you make them feel sad. They give because they think giving will make them feel better. Emotion is the goal, not the cause of the behavior. I can’t stress this enough as it’s one of the more important, ignored bits of effective fundraising.
Anyhooooo, back to our originally scheduled program.
We’ve got a large list of action words linked to emotions that we use for writing and designing fundraising. Here is a snippet that you should keep as reference. Do a search and replace with the simple, too literal emotion terms and try to tell a story instead with the action word.
The top action words for each emotion are listed as are top synonyms for certain action words – e.g., scream/shout/yell/shriek.
Kevin
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