Influence by Jenny Nabben

Author:Jenny Nabben [Nabben, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781292005225
Publisher: Pearson Education Limited
Published: 2013-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

Exercise

Turn the following words into verbs:

Credibility

Persuasion

Communication

Influence

4th rule of language as a tool of influence:

Turn dead language back to living experiences. Activate your brain by activating your language – this encourages more ‘movement’ in the mind and in finding more creative solutions.

Shifty language

Nominalisations are sometimes used by businesses and politicians to shift responsibility for a particular decision or action – for example, if a CEO presents a decision as being made by the leadership of the business (rather than himself or the leaders in the executive team). There’s no such thing as leadership, only people who lead and who are responsible for taking decisions. The word management is also often used in this context. These words are often used when leaders want to distance themselves from ‘blame’ or responsibility, but the danger for leaders who use these when delivering difficult messages is that they distance themselves from employees and lose trust and credibility.

Another example of shifty language is the phrase ‘It has been decided’ which only begs the question ‘By whom?’ One of the most infamous examples of this use of language was when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State in George Bush’s administration, said, when responding to journalists about the Haditha massacre (where 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by a group of United States Marines), that: ‘Things that shouldn’t happen do happen in war.’ Or, in street slang, ‘Shit happens. Get over it.’

The author Henry Hitchings decribed this phenomenon very clearly:

Nominalizations give priority to actions rather than to the people responsible for them. Sometimes this is apt, perhaps because we don’t know who is responsible or because responsibility isn’t relevant. But often they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics and in business. They emphasize products and results, rather than the processes by which products and results are achieved.

(Hitchings, H, 2013, The dark side of verbs-as-nouns)

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