Recently I wrote about Pink Floyd and how listening to rock songs is a good way to learn how to make a limited vocabulary go a long way. Today’s email digs deeper into that theme. Some of you saw an article like this from me in March, but many of you haven’t seen it, so here goes…

Years ago, when I was a university student in Chicago, I wanted so badly to go to Timisoara, Romania.

It was early in 1990, and a few weeks before, they had shot Nikolae Ceausescu in the head and broadcast his dead body on international TV. And they did it on Christmas Day, to boot!

I figured that if a group of people were that badass, I wanted to go there and visit them. I wanted to see this for myself.

Back up a second. Each Sunday morning, after breakfast in the university’s Woodward Court dining hall, I would sit in the reading room of the Harper Memorial Library, one of my most favorite libraries ever:

On one of those big tables, I would spread the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune newspaper out in front of me. The Trib had a great Travel section, and I would spend hours paging through it, in part to stare dreamily at the discount airfares buried in the back of the section. One of the destinations listed one week was Timisoara. When I saw that ad, I couldn’t help but drool at the prospect of going to the place where the uprising had started.

You might be wondering, quite understandably, what this has to do with you. Here is what it has to do with you:

Your customer’s decision to hire you happens in their head, not yours, just like my fascination with Timisoara was happening in my head, not on the pages of the Tribune, not on the oak tabletop I was reading on, and certainly not in the Sony factory that made the TV that showed me the hole in Ceausescu’s head.

And so the words you use in your sales presentation, or your investor presentation, have to go into your client’s head and open up and take life, much like a drywall anchor bolt…

Initially, the jaws of a drywall anchor bolt are closed. They look like the closed mouth of an alligator, and the bolt can slip into a tiny hole. But when the end of the bolt gets into the empty space on the other side of the hole, the jaws pop open and you can’t pull the bolt out, it’s stuck in there.

Your words need to be like this. They have to be able to go into a very small hole, but then they need to burst into life and stay anchored in your listener’s head, like a song that is stuck in there and won’t come out.

Knowing which words have this effect, and which ones don’t, is very difficult when you are not a native English speaker. It can take years, and you don’t have that kind of time.

Also, if you are a non-native speaker speaking to other non-native speakers, you need to know which words will create this effect but still be understood by your audience.

There are a few things you can do. One is to is to copy/paste your text into ChatGPT and tell it to “rewrite this using more vivid verbs.” Another is to listen to lots of songs, like I recommended in that recent Pink Floyd email. You can also look things up in the thesaurus.

But those techniques are too error-prone for high-stakes stuff, like a board presentation or an investment pitch deck. That’s where hiring someone like me comes in.

Sometimes, though, the stakes are low or you have time to DIY a solution, so in the next email, I’m going to show you a tip. Almost all of my students will recognize it, because I do it with them regularly.