Member-only story
Wordsmiths Must Meet People Where They Are
Mass media and the importance of brevity present wordsmiths with difficult decisions. Word choices will have far reaching effects for social movements.
Part of progress is convincing the other camp that change is a’comin’ and there will be a right side of history. Essential to that goal is considering how people will receive a message. English and Rhetoric courses in Humanities programs around the country emphasize tailoring a message to a specific audience. The challenge arises when progressive sentiment is condensed into statements that are only a few words in length. It is difficult to include Aristotle’s Ethos, Pathos and Logos in a phrase that can be just as many words or less. See Obama’s 2008 slogan: “Yes we can!”
Brevity distills the message
If online platforms like Twitter and TikTok are any indication with how the war of ideas will be fought in the future, then brevity is king (or queen). The double-edged sword of modern messaging is that words can reach global distribution. Phrases and slogans can be so far distributed from their source that audiences unfamiliar with a movement begin to engage with them. And in those scenarios, the merits of the movement have to stand on the few words that serve as the umbrella for like ideas.
Consider the term “Global Warming,” two words synonymous with man-made climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” There is decades of research across multiple factors and regions proving the globe is heating up. Now consider the neutral person accessing Twitter from a remote village in Alaska. They scroll past an activist who tweets, “Global Warming is real.” For those with the context, Global Warming makes sense as a term. However, for the passive onlooker, especially one living in a region where temperatures regularly dip below freezing, Global Warming sounds less realistic. In this scenario, granted it’s fictional, the merits of climate change research must stand on a poorly-coined term Global Warming.
Now imagine the same type of situation for something like “Gun Control” in a community where…
