What the words you use say about you
Language is fascinating for many reasons. It is a unique tool for communication between people that has existed for thousands of years and…
Okay, who am I kidding? Language is kind of boring.
But what if I told you that the words you use reveal something about you? About your relationship with other people? About your unique psychology?
Well, that’s exactly what I am telling you.
I bet I have your attention now.
What you will learn
In this article, you will learn about exciting language research from social-psychologist, James Pennebaker, and his colleagues.
The article contains two parts: In part one, we will explore writing tips that can help us reap more benefits from journaling. And in the second part, we will turn to findings on language use and what it can say about our unique psychology. These interesting results concern our personality, social status, and relationships.
Now, the findings are plucked out by myself. They are what I’ve personally found the most fascinating and relevant based on my “let’ s-get-on-with-it” millennial attitude. Hopefully, you will find it exciting as well.
But if you’re interested, I recommend you dig into the book for yourself. It’s a ride called The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker.
Now, you’re going to learn a lot of different things in this article, and you will become quite smart. But just to help out a bit more, I’ve made you a little summary, in the end, to help you keep the overview. This way, you also have something to return to later.
Let’s get to it!
Before we dig in: Do you know what function words are?
As I explored the book’s content, one finding was especially surprising to me: the kind of words that broadcast our personalities. It is something called function words that are the key players.
I’m not sure what I had expected. Maybe I thought that big emotional words such as ‘heartbroken’ or ‘ecstatic’ or writing ‘Instagram’ a million times would be revealing.
But I was wrong.
Instead, the words that reveal the most about us are these tiny words we hardly notice ourselves using:
“Often, some of the most revealing words that we use are the shortest and most forgettable. Pronouns (such as I, you, we, and they), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (e.g. to, for, over), and other stealth words broadcast the kind of people we are.” (It’s from the book)
I think of them as ‘functional’ because they glue our sentences together. More importantly, though, the main takeaway is this: these tiny overlooked words signal something significant about yourself.
Here’s how they did it: They created different categories of words (he calls them dictionaries). Then a computer program counts the total number of words in a text and uses this to calculate the percentage of words from different categories.
For example: “I say ‘I’ too many times”. There are 6 words, and 2 of them are I, which means that there is a 33% use of this pronoun the sentence. That’s sort of high, I guess (although I’m not really sure).
But you get the idea.
That knowledge can be used to find psychological patterns by analyzing different writings from an individual across time.
Now let’s take a look at what they found.
Part 1: Words of healthy writing
The name Pennebaker may sound familiar to you if you’ve read my other articles. That’s right: he is the guy behind the expressive writing studies.
As you recall, the expressive writing studies went something like this: Write about a traumatic experience for 20 minutes straight for four consecutive days. And people become healthier.
But some participants got healthier than others. So Pennebaker and his colleagues analyzed the texts and discovered that there were differences in writing.
Some writings were healthier than others.
And these are the three things that characterize this health-giving writing: A balance of positive and negative emotions, creating a story, and changing perspectives.
I will tell you a little more about what they mean.
Find a balance between positive and negative emotions
Words for positive emotions such as love, care, happy are good. The study results indicate that the more people used these positive words, the healthier they got. In other words: finding the benefit of trauma might make you healthier.
But it depends on how you use negative emotion words such as sadness, anger, pain, etc.
People who used a lot of negative emotions did not benefit from writing. Surprisingly, this was also the case for people who used only very few negative words.
How can we understand such conflicting results?
Well, here’s a suggestion: It means that ruminating is bad. And so is numbing your negative emotions.
So you have to find a balance. You shouldn’t suppress the negative, but you also shouldn’t let it rule your life.
The balance between positive and negative emotions in your writing can be summarized like this: “Acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.”
Create a story
When it comes to good writing, two other word categories showed up. These are self-reflection/insight-words (think, realize, believe) and causal words (because, effect, rationale).
It turns out that the people who benefitted the most from writing shared a similar pattern. They started out using only a few of these insight-words on day 1 but increased their use until day 4.
What’s interesting is that it wasn’t helpful to use these insight-words already from day 1.
This seems illogical, right? If these words are good to use in and of themselves, it should be fine to start using them from day 1, right?
Not right.
I was confused as well.
The reason is that creating a story is helpful. Already having the story figured out on day 1 doesn’t do much.
Let me give you a metaphor that may help explain this.
Metaphor: Imagine that trauma (something emotionally upsetting) creates a bunch of puzzle pieces that are dropped inside your mind. These puzzle pieces don’t have a place where they belong yet. So they roam about and create chaos.
This makes you unhealthy.
As you begin to create an understanding of what happened, you create places in your mind to put the pieces. As the pieces fall into place, they become a part of your system. They stop disrupting you in the same way, and you regain some sort of balance.
This makes you healthier.
Going from a disorganized to an organized mind is partly reflected in the increase in the use of insight-words. Using these insight-words to start with might indicate that you have already gained an understanding of the event. In that case, writing about it may not be helpful.
So here is the bottom line: You should write if you feel unsorted about something that has happened.
If so, you should spill out all your emotions and thoughts onto the paper. You don’t need to organize anything. Then return to it later and try to make sense of stuff. Create a story.
If you’re finding it difficult, ask yourself this: How would someone looking from the outside explain the whole thing?
Change your perspective
Lastly, there was another quite surprising finding. It turns out that healthy writers switch between using a lot of I-words in one text to using a lot of other pronouns (such as her, he, they, etc.) in another.
And they continue shifting back and forth in different writings.
“In other words, healthy people say something about their own thoughts and feelings in one instance and then explore what is happening with other people before writing about themselves again” (Cool, right?).
So make sure to think about other people as well.
Summary of part 1: Words of healthy writing
Ruminating about something that happened is negative. This is something we all know. It doesn’t move us anywhere.
And listening to someone complain about the same problem over and over can get quite annoying after a while.
I think it was Jordan Peterson (the famous Canadian psychology professor), who said: “You shouldn’t be thinking about your past. If you’re thinking about your past, it’s like your soul is trapped there”.
So Pennebaker’s studies of words and healthy writing make a lot of sense. Acknowledging the negative, finding the positive, making sense of the situation (by creating a story), and changing perspective all play a vital part in learning from our experiences.
This leaves us more equipped to take on the future.
And that is the whole point.
Sidenote: Using specific words won’t cause psychological states. Words are only a reflection. This means you won’t become happier by using the word ‘happy’ in your writing. But you might become happier by trying to find the benefit of a situation. And this, in turn, might show up in your writing.
But it doesn’t work the other way around.
Part 2: Words that reveal your personality, social status, and relationship
In this second part, we will explore some other interesting findings of language. They concern your personality, your social status, and the quality of your relationships.
Your personality speaks
Personality is a difficult concept to define — and yet we all have some sense of what it is. It tells us something about who we are. How we think, feel, and behave.
It describes a pattern.
Patterns are exactly what Pennebaker and his colleagues found in their analysis of people’s use of function words. Three overall patterns of thinking emerged: formal, analytical, and narrative.
These patterns can be used to distinguish between people.
So let’s have a closer look, shall we?
Formal thinking is stiff, sometimes humorless, and with a touch of arrogance. You might recognize it. It’s the tone of reading a scientific article or closing a business deal.
Studies show that people with formal thinking have things in common. They tend to be more focused on status and power, and they are less self-reflective. They also tend to drink and smoke less as well as be more mentally healthy.
I find that quite interesting.
Analytical thinking is characteristic of people who work to understand their world. This form of thinking entails using a lot of causal words (because, reason, effect) and insight words (realize, know, meaning). There is cognitive complexity in their writing.
People with analytical thinking tend to be more honest and more open to new experiences. They also have more complex views of themselves.
Narrative thinking is story-telling. This is the writing of natural storytellers. I think we’ve all met such a person once in our lives — perhaps you even are such a person. If so, you might notice that your writing tends to have more personal pronouns and past tense verbs.
People with this form of thinking usually have better social skills. They have more friends, and they rate themselves as more outgoing.
What is interesting about these three different kinds of thinking is that they reveal something about how people organize their worlds. How they relate to others.
But what does that mean for you?
Is there one form of thinking that might reflect your way of thinking better than the others? Can you perhaps recognize some of the personality traits that are connected with that form of thinking?
You could take that in and see what comes up about yourself. Or use this knowledge to see the people around you in a different light.
The word of social status
Social status exists.
We don’t like to talk about it. Still, the reality is this: There are people we are intimidated by, and then there are people we intimidate.
It’s how the world works. For anything to matter, there simply has to be some things that are better than others. Otherwise, everything begins to mean nothing.
In other words: there is a social hierarchy in the world. Some jobs are better than others, some living conditions are better than others, and some skill levels are better than others. We all know this.
When it comes to language, there is especially one word that signals this hierarchy. It is the pronoun ‘I’.
People with a higher social status usually use ‘I’ less than people lower in the hierarchy.
Overthinking or focusing too much on ourselves reflects a sort of insecurity. It is characteristic for people with depression that they tend to look too much at themselves, whereas confident people focus on other people. And this is partly reflected in how much we use the pronoun ‘I’ in conversations.
Take a moment to look over your emails or Facebook conversations with people you regard as either higher or lower in social status. Try to see if you can notice a difference in how you speak, especially regarding how often you use ‘I.’ For example, compare how you communicate with your boss or your professor with how you write your younger sibling. Can you see a difference?
That’s the social hierarchy at work.
Relationships and language style matching (LSM)
The concept that can tell us the most about the quality of our relationships is called language style matching (LSM). Now, what on earth is LSM, and why does it matter?
These are good questions, so let’s start here:
LSM is a technique that measures whether two people are using function words at the same rate.
From the beginning of this article, you might remember that function words are the words that reveal the most about our psychologies. By figuring out how well two people are synced in their use of function words, you can say something about the quality of their conversation.
A high level of LSM means that the two people involved are paying close attention to each other.
Pennebaker and his colleagues have found that LSM could be used to predict which couples would stay together and which would break up.
That’s right. The couples with higher LSM were more likely to stay together than the couples with a lower LSM.
Here’s why.
Matching your partner’s use of function words keeps the conversation flowing. This only happens by paying close attention. We may not necessarily be aware of it. But it is a natural result of being genuinely engaged in a conversation.
The more attention we pay to one another, the more likely we are to understand each other. This increases the likelihood of solving whatever issues may arise in the relationship.
So it makes sense that the couples that stayed together had a higher level of LSM.
Now, it is a semi-complicated business to explain precisely how LSM is calculated. It is probably not something we will go out and calculate for ourselves.
But there is another way of detecting it: Trusting your gut.
More specifically, your feeling of ‘clicking.’ If you don’t feel like you ‘click’ with the person you are talking to, it might mean that either you or the other person isn’t truly engaged in the conversation.
A short (well-deserved) summary
I applaud you for making it this far. Who knew that the way we use language could reveal so much about ourselves?
I have started paying a lot more attention to the words I use with different people. And I use this knowledge to think about what it could say about my relationship with the person I am talking to.
These results are only the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure that there will be even more focus on the power of language in the future and how it expresses something very intimate about us.
To help you remember everything I’ve covered in this article, I will leave you with a shortlist of the main takeaways.
You’re welcome.
Part 1: If you want to do some healthy writing, you should:
- acknowledge the negative
- find the positive and celebrate it
- create a story/understanding of what happened
- change perspective. Switch between exploring how you are thinking/feeling and how other people are thinking/feeling
Part 2: Pay attention to:
- your personality by considering whether you usually engage in formal, analytical, or narrative thinking. What might this mean for the way you engage with other people?
- your social status by looking at how often — and with who — you use the pronoun I (confident/higher social status people don’t focus too much on themselves)
- the quality of your relationships through how well you are ‘clicking’ in conversations. If you feel something is ‘off’, the person listening to you might not be paying enough attention
