Sound and texture

A friend and I were talking Sunday afternoon and he asked me about something I supposedly wrote years ago about relationships with clients. Oh yes, I said, "bidder, vendor, partner." "Yeah, that was it," he said. 

It was about six years ago. Those three words were the pillars of a presentation I made to an agency about the importance of understanding where you stood at any given time in your relationship with a client. Were you a bidder seeking to win a contract? A vendor who could be plugged into a project as needed? Or a partner in developing critical solutions? 

Someone reminds me of that presentation about once a year. Here's how I think it lives on in the minds of those who were in the audience that day: they remember (1) how they felt when they heard it, and (2) there were three words that sounded alike. 

It's no different for me. When my friend, who had heard about it second-hand six years removed, asked me about it, my mind immediately went searching for the three words and came up with "bidder, vendor, partner." And I remembered feeling as good giving it as I had ever felt in a room full of business colleagues. 

Several years ago I was asked about the possibility of doing a repeat performance at a different agency. I went back and found the original presentation and was surprised by how much substance it contained. It runs much deeper than three words. But without those three words, you have no mental gateway to it. I remember that in the early versions, I had "bidder" and "partner" but the middle word was something that didn't match the ending sound of "er." I was smart enough to hold off going public with it until I came up with the "vendor" tag. 

In the book Words that Work: It's not what you say, it's what people hear, published in 2007, Dr. Frank Luntz offers 10 rules of effective language. Rule Six is "Sound and Texture Matter." He writes:

The sounds and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves. A string of words that have the same first letter, the same sound, or the same syllabic cadence is more memorable than a random collection of sounds. The first five rules in this chapter do just that: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, and novelty stand out because they all end with the same sound. 

That's good to know, but here's what happens in a corporate review process: content stomps all over sound-and-texture. Multiple reviewers take content from other sources and drop it into the draft wherever it suits them. Dr. Luntz's other nine rules get stomped too.

Unless!

Unless we're talking about a speech. With a speech, we have one decision-maker, and he or she knows to expect instant and highly personalized feedback from an audience that's sitting right in front of them. The good speakers will close the content spigot in time to think about how people are going to hear what they're saying. That's why, in my experience, if you really want to change something with words, do it in a speech.