Are You Not Aware Of The Massive Flexibility Of Presuppositions? This is an article in a series on linguistic presuppositions, those powerfully effective language patterns that you can use conversationally to persuade your listeners and readers. Today’s pattern is called the “Spurious Not,” and is similar in structure to both the rhetorical question pattern and [...]
Do You Know Anything As Powerful As Presuppositions? Here we go with another article on linguistic presuppositions, the powerful language patterns that you can use to easily, naturally, and covertly persuade others through everyday conversation. Today’s pattern is the “comparative as” and is very powerful. The structure of a comparative as is as follows: Take [...]
The AMAZING power of presuppositions This is another article in a series on linguistic presuppositions, those powerful language patterns that can easily give you the persuasive power of a Jedi Knight. Today’s pattern is stressed sentences, or stressed words within a sentence. Although they can be used in written form, with boldface type, they are [...]
What’s amazing is how powerful these patterns are This is another article in a series on how you can use linguistic presuppositions to easily and naturally persuade others to your way of thinking. Linguistic presuppositions are sentences that on a logical level are very hard to argue with. When you combine several of them together, [...]
Leading Experts Agree This article is part three in a series on using presuppositions to covert persuasion and influence. Presuppositions are one of the most powerful yet least known about methods of influence. They work by constructing a sentence that pre supposes certain things (of your choice) to be true, things that your listener or [...]
Pistols At Dawn I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and I noticed something interesting about her speech. She had always spoken like that, but I hadn’t talked to her in quite a while. Last time we spoke was before I had become interested in language, having read several books on linguistics and [...]
Can You Repeat That Please? I remember once I played a game with a group of highly educated, professional ESL students I was teaching. I’ve heard this game called “Chinese whispers,” or the “telephone game,” or other things. I even remember playing it once or twice as a kid. And even with a group of [...]
Captain, That Is Illogical Here’s an interesting mind experiment. Ready? Here is the situation; you have four cards, with the following faces showing. D, 7, 3, F. You are told that each card has a number on one side, and a letter on the other. Now you are given a statement: On every card that [...]
Teach An Old Dog New Tricks? The other night, I decided to go out for a walk. I recently moved to new part of town, and decided to go and check things out. The sun has been setting later and later recently, and I had gotten off a little earlier than normal from work, so [...]
Organized Randomness So the other day I was out riding my bike, and I took a wrong turn. I was in my old neighborhood, but it had been a while, so I was busy kind of looking around and not really paying attention to where I was going. I saw these kids jumping rope, and [...]