Choice Words on Metaphors

• Author: Kyle Callahan
• Posted: September 9, 2008
• Category: Communications
• Tags: Recruitment Communications, writing
• Comments:

Over on MarketingProfs.com, Ernest Nicastro writes some choice words on word choice, and while the advice he gives is sound enough (”For more effective word choice, think harder about the words you choose”) the things he suggests we think about are hardly that last word on the subject.

Mr. Nicastro gives us two simple steps to follow:

1. Choose small simple words
2. Use mainly nouns and verbs and vigorous, active-voice words

Both of these are helpful.

But there’s an important ingredient missing from all of this. And it’s what the cognitive linguist George Lakeoff calls “conceptual metaphors.”

The gist of it is that metaphors — thinking of this in terms of that — are central to development of our thoughts. For example, when we think about arguing, we often conceptualize within the terms of war:

• Your claims are indefensible
• He attacked every weak point in my argument
• His criticisms were right on target
• I demolished his argument
• She shot down all of my arguments

As Lakeoff writes in his book, Metaphors We Live By:

“It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person arguing with us as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own…If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war…it structures the actions we perform…” (4).

When I first came across Lakoff’s theories, I found them mind-blowing on several different levels, but when I started implementing those theories into the choices I made in my writing, I found myself in a whole new world.

Here’s how you do it.

As Mr. Nicastro suggests, it’s all about word choice. You still want small, simple words, and you still want vigorous, active-voice words, but now you also want them all to fit into the same metaphorical system.

When I say metaphor, I don’t mean Shakespearean sonnets. I mean the framework your words give rise to. When you write, “He attacked every weak point in my argument,” you need to see the battle that’s raging in your words, and once you do, you’ll see how it limits the choices you have for the next words you can write.

This is not a bad thing. Narrowing the field is the first step in any important choice.

But here’s the best part: You’re already using conceptual metaphors in your writing. You can’t help it. It’s how we think. That is Lakoff’s (and his professional partner, Mark Johnson’s) big discovery: “Human thought processes are largely metaphorical” (6).

So you don’t need to start doing it. You just need to start recognizing it. Seeing the metaphors already at work in your writing will make your word choices more potent.

And when you extend your conceptual metaphor beyond the level of the sentence and out into the whole paragraph, or further, into the whole document, your readers will (consciously or unconsciously) hook into that conceptual framework, and (if you know what you’re talking about) find themselves nodding in agreement.

In the war for better writing, conceptual frameworks help target your thinking and your writing with laser-like precision. As those wacky kids say, conceptual frameworks are the bomb.