The Most Persuasive Words in English are…

WordPress sent me an email newsletter yesterday and I couldn’t help but click on their catchy headline title about writing catchy headline titles:

I do enjoy overselling the odd post with excitable headlines but it’s all in good fun. I really don’t feel the need to start optimising content for search engines or getting tactical about my reach but I quite enjoyed this article and some of the links within.

There’s no doubt that the choice of words can influence us in unseen ways, there’s lots of research proving that but I’ve never stopped to think about which words are considered the most influential.

Well, according to the article, it’s these ones:

Hmmmm….well, I guess it could be these? Certainly ‘you’, ‘free’ and ‘because’ would be up near the top.

How about this next list though. It’s from a guy called David Ogilvy who apparently is the ‘Father of Advertising’. He picked the following words as the most influential:

I’m less sure of this list — it seems a bit 1950s. Quite a few of these words would stop me reading rather than convince me to start. In any case it’s interesting to think about language and the ways it pulls and pushes us about.

Have a great weekend everyone!