Distribute Semantically Related Words

Your brain is a web of knowledge. Activating one concept will activate concepts that are connected to it (Collins & Loftus, 1975).

Read these words: DEEP, SALTY, FOAM

These ideas are related to SEA. While reading those words, you activated the concept of SEA because of “spreading activation” (Topolinski & Strack, 2008).

Apply this idea in your writing. In the previous sentence, I could replace “idea” with “technique” because technique has a stronger relationship with the term “apply.”

Fill your sentences with semantically related words so that every concept becomes more activated. Selling a coffee brewer? You could say:

• If you make coffee…
• If you brew coffee…

Not only is “brew” more vivid, but it also relates to “coffee.” Reading “brew” activates the idea of “coffee” even before you reach this word. This syntax will be easier to read, more enjoyable, and more truthful (see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009).

• Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and social psychology review, 13(3), 219-235.
• Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological review, 82(6), 407.
• Topolinski, S., & Strack, F. (2008). Where there’s a will—there’s no intuition. The unintentional basis of semantic coherence judgments. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(4), 1032-1048.