Take action: Once you’ve identified the reasons for how you’re feeling, you can take action to manage your reaction to them and deal with the triggers.You may be feeling lonely and isolated and craving some social interaction. However, it’s been months since you’ve seen your friends. For instance, maybe you’re feeling sad but nothing sad happened that day. Spend some time reflecting on your day, past week, month, or even year. When people are emotionally heightened, it’s often not due to a single event but a series of experiences. Reflect on why you’re feeling this way: The next step is to dig a little deeper to discover potential causes for these feelings.Giving words to those feelings can help you feel more in control of them. Look at the wheel and go through the list of emotions to find one or more that describes that feeling. Name your emotion: Maybe you had a bad day at work.So I challenge you: In your next Visionary essay, use emotional words. Using emotional adverbs is a good idea, yet an even better one is to use precise verbs. Words like love, joy, and fear are good, but too general to make much of an impact. One way to engage our readers’ emotions is through the use of emotion words. And we love it when our emotions are engaged. As in: “June ran happily.” Or “The movie ended abruptly.” Or “Her mod outfit displayed Brigit’s delightfully quirky personality.” Adverbs are words that typically end in -ly, and they modify verbs. We can also use adverbs to display emotion. (As per the nature of depression itself!) But if we say “Claude skulked into the room,” we can tell there’s something up. We can say “Claude is depressed,” but again, that’s lifeless. Now let’s look at Claude, who is terminally depressed. It’s a safe bet that Fred is a positive, happy person. On the other hand, if you say “Fred exploded into the room,” you already know that Fred is enthusiastic and energetic (at least in this instance). The writer then has to do more work to provide relevant information as to how. But it might not be in line with the original intent. There’s no telling what the writer had in mind, so the reader will create an image in their head that makes sense to them. The reader is confused because there are a zillion different ways someone can come into a room. If you say “Fred came into the room,” that’s flat and lifeless. Here’s the trick to generating greater engagement with your words, no matter if you’re writing a Visionary essay, copy for your website, or a letter to your Dad: This literal meaning is also known as the denotation.) The word “enchanted” refines into “enthralled” and “rapturous.” And from the word “sentimental,” we get “tender” and “nostalgic.” ( Remember, a “connotation” is the undercurrent of a word, the feeling that it invokes in addition to its literal meaning. These emotions can be further refined into different words with slightly different connotations. The basic emotion of “Love” can be further refined into “enchanted,” “romantic,” “affectionate,” and “sentimental.” The emotion named “euphoric” inhabits a space between Love and its neighbor “Joy.” And there are the less positive ones, or fear, anger, and sadness. This is just one of them.Īccording to the Junto model, there are six “basic emotions.” There’s love, joy, and surprise. Yet those words are not specific enough to elicit an emotional response from our readers.Īn aside: There are many different “emotion wheels” and methods for refining basic emotions. It’s easy to classify emotions as “good” or “bad,” positive or negative. “How do we create emotions in our readers?”Įasy-peasy! You evoke those emotions with emotion words. “But John,” I can already hear you asking. Our essays are stories, and a story without emotions seems flat. And we engage with those stories through our emotions. But in this moment, I’d like to draw your attention to another thing these stories have in common: Now, I’ll be writing another essay on using Story at a later date. I wouldn’t presume to think we have that kind of time or person-power as we craft our essays. Every stray word, every misplaced image, every character that doesn’t serve the plot ends up on the cutting room floor. Granted, these stories have gone through endless amounts of refinement and re-jiggering. If you think about it, it’s really pretty simple. What do these books and movies all have in common? I’ll give you that the commonality might not be easy to pick out, but if you think about it … Consider the success of a few movies: Star Wars.
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