Yeah, you can have it your way with words

MEETINGS are the bane of many workers’ lives, but there is now scientific research to suggest that getting what you want in one is as simple as just saying “yeah”.

According to research by Professor Cynthia Rudin and PhD student Been Kim of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, the use of specific words in a proposal significantly increased the chances of it being accepted.

Analysing vocabulary usage and dialogue patterns in 95 meetings, they found that the words most likely to get your boss or colleagues to agree with you included “yeah”, “start”, “meeting”, “people”, “give” and “discuss”.

Rudin said “yeah” could be persuasive because “if the idea comes across as if it were in line with previous thoughts by others, the suggestion has a higher chance of being accepted”.

“Perhaps if you frame a suggestion as if it were in agreement with others, it’s more likely to be accepted,” she said.

Words to avoid include “buttons”, “speech”, “recognition”, “fair”, “flat”, “animals”, “middle” and “bottom”.

Rudin said the study of meetings was important because “having a collection of persuasive words can be immediately useful, assuming that there is a causal relationship between persuasive words and accepted proposals, rather than only a correlation”. — © The Daily Telegraph, London