Make your words leap off the page
Make your words leap off the page
By Tony Spencer-Smith
Learn techniques to transform your writing from ordinary to captivating. Explore the power of sound, rhetoric, and metaphor to make your words engaging, persuasive, and memorable.
When we read a piece of writing, it can plod along and leave us cold, or leap off the page to excite and engage us.
What is it that gives words the energy to entrance and convince us? That is something we surely need to know as writers, if we want to lift our writing beyond the mundane to the exciting.
CCE facilitator, Tony Spencer-Smith has spent a great deal of time analysing that special spark, and here are five tips to help you achieve that quantum leap in the quality of your writing.
Let your words sing
Take account of the sound of your words, not just their meanings. From early childhood, we are fascinated by rhyme and alliteration, which is using a number of words starting with the same consonant.
As the great American writer William Zinsser wrote: “Bear in mind, when you’re choosing words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they’re reading far more than you realize. Therefore such matter as rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”
That’s why the last line of The Great Gatsby is so powerful; Scott Fitzgerald loaded it with b sounds:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Use the powerful skills of rhetoric
There are so many ways you can phrase a sentence to increase its persuasive power.
John Kennedy, in his inaugural address, could simply have said: “We must not be afraid to negotiate.” He chose a much more powerful rhetorical path: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” This is a rhetorical device called chiasmus, where word order is reversed for effect. Never mind the name; just remember how this works to give extra power.
Break free of the literal
The literal is great if you are telling people how to go through the 100 steps to assembling a piece of IKEA furniture.
If you want to inspire them, reach for figures of speech like metaphor. That’s what Tim Winton did when he wrote about the healing power of the sea:
The ocean was always there, a vast salty poultice sucking the poison from my system.
The ocean is of course not literally something applied to a wound to soothe and heal it, but it works as a metaphor for the way Winton sought out the sea to cope with the wounds of life.
Make novel word choices
Anyone can trot out clichés and well-worn words. Good writers try to break the mould, to find words that have never been used before in a particular context but that work wonderfully in a particular sentence.
That’s what Alexander Frater did when he described a coconut palm as “whippy enough” to survive a typhoon.
Tell me a story
People identify with stories; they suspend their usual critical faculties and are swept away by the narrative thread.
Good anecdotes have an extraordinary power to draw people into a topic, show them how big ideas are grounded in everyday reality, and convince them of the validity of what you are saying.
This is just a hint of the numerous ways in which you can supercharge words. If you want to explore these techniques and many more, and turn your writing from okay to mesmeric, you can do it at CCE’s new course, The Secrets of Eloquence.
Tony Spencer-Smith is an award-winning novelist, a former Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest Magazine and an experienced corporate writer and writing trainer. His book The Essentials of Great Writing was published in Sydney in 2009. His course The Secrets of Eloquence is the culmination of all he has learnt about the writing craft, both as a writer and a trainer.