Always allow for alliteration

Reuters/Abdel Hadi Ramahi

Are you back up to speed again after your summer sun? Have you dealt with everything you might have missed? Have you got over any shocks or surprises? I hope so.

But, if you didn’t see the last of these columns, maybe there is one final piece of catching up still to do.

If you did read it, you’ll already know why I opened with three questions. If you read it, you’ll know that we humans are not as smart as we like to think we are. If you read it, you’ll know that the language of leadership is all about getting inside instincts.

And I cannot possibly overstate how important this is, because it has profound implications on how you should talk to people if you want them to follow you.

The fact that we humans are, in essence, creatures of instinct means that we tend to accept things that feel right, that sound right. 

This is because we simply do not have the brain bandwidth to logically consider every piece of information our senses receive, so we go through life scanning for things that don’t quite feel as they should: things that are out of place. 

If you walk alongside a road, for example, you do not flinch every time a car approaches – even though any given car could lose control and kill you – but if you hear a vehicle accelerating hard, that’s different: it is out of place and needs checking out.

This basic human quality means that, if you want to convince people and have them follow you, you need to make sure that what you say doesn’t ring those alarm bells, that what you say doesn’t make people feel like they need to question it. In other words, what you say has to both make sense … and sound like it makes sense.

One super easy way to do this is alliteration – the repetition of sounds in words next or near to each other. As long as you don’t overdo it, people generally do not even notice it happening – they just feel that what they have heard sounds nice, or what they have read flows freely. 

Take the opening sentences above, where we have: “speed … summer sun”, “might have missed” and “shocks or surprises”. In the next paragraph we have “language of leadership” and “inside instincts”.

Disney knows its power to please: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Peter Pan. Big brands use it: Coca-Cola, Samsung, Tata. Tech titans love it: PayPal, Google, TikTok.

It is so powerful, people throw around alliterative phrases even when they are obviously false: curiosity killed the cat (no reported cases), fortune favours the bold (jumping off a cliff is bold but the results are normally most unfortunate), practice makes perfect (if that were true I should be perfect at golf and world number one, but my practice appears to make me worse).

Alliteration works in the most complex and impressive rhetoric (Malcom X: The Ballot or the Bullet), and it works for the everyday too, lifting it up, keeping audiences engaged and carrying people along.

In late August, for example, Yasser Mufti, EVP products and customers at Saudi Aramco, gave a speech in China. It is not “I Have a Dream”, but it was never intended to be. It is more: “I have a desire to do more business in China”. Yet he uses alliteration to lift it wherever he can.

“The world has watched in wonder” at China’s progress, he said, adding that, “Shandong has been central to that success over the past seven decades.”

On the same day as Mr Mufti was speaking in China, Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi – UAE minister of state for foreign trade – had an op-ed published.

As he takes the reader through the UAE’s Africa investment strategy, he writes of “crops of cotton, cassava and rice”, about jobs being created (“the vast majority outside the main metropolis”) and the great scope of the investment push: “from Cairo to Cape Town, Morocco to Mozambique”. There is more, but you get the point.

Investing in Africa makes sense. Using alliteration helps it sound like it makes sense too. That matters.

Yet making sure you sound right is a piece of magic that combines many elements, not just alliteration. You need a box of tricks, not just a magic wand. Next month, we can start looking deeper into that box of tricks.

Lech Mintowt-Czyz is a multi-award winning speechwriter who helps leaders with all their thought leadership needs through his company Speech Success: www.speechsuccess.world. He used to be a journalist for British national newspapers the Daily Mail and The Times