Emotive and EmotionalEmotive language is not the same as emotional language. Words spoken or written are "emotional," if, essentially, they express the feelings of the person who utters them:You are the dearest person in the world to me. I love you more than I could ever express. The above is an emotional statement, as are the following:Your dog is a vicious, nasty, smelly creature, and it ought to be put down. That is simply the sweetest thing that anyone has ever said to me. Give me liberty, or give me death. Another way of defining emotional language is to say that its essential content is an emotion, and any information it provides is secondary to the feeling that it conveys.What we call "emotive language," on the other hand, is language that is intended to arouse emotion in the reader or listener:You are the dearest person in the world to me, and I cannot bear to see you throw your life away like this. The above is an emotive statement, as are the following:There's no excuse for keeping a dog when he's vicious, nasty, and smelly and simply a trouble to himself and you. You never say sweet things to me now like you used to. Your country needs you. Whatever the content of an emotive statement, its main purpose is to appeal to the emotions of the person at whom it is directed.It is difficult, however, to draw a hard-and-fast distinction between what is emotional and what is emotive. If you feel strongly about something, you will generally want other people to share your feelings. Wanting other people to share your feelings, in fact, will often be your motive for putting pen to paper or standing up to make a speech. Ordinary human experience, moreover, tells us that one of the best ways of arousing feeling in other people is to show feeling in yourself. If you can contemplate something unmoved, you are perhaps unlikely to be able to stir emotions for or against it in anybody else. Police officers know that to put victims of crime or members of a victim's family in front of a camera so that they can speak of their grief and suffering is usually a sure way of striking a chord with the public and producing information that will help their investigations. Hostage takers, however, share the same knowledge and use images of their victims' fear and suffering to put pressure on the authorities, or whomever they wish to extort money or concessions from, to make them comply with their wishes.It is therefore highly likely that you will want to write material that is both emotional and emotive. You might also say that it is impossible to keep emotionality and emotiveness out of any kind of writing that is likely to be worth reading. This is true. On the other hand, both "emotional" and "emotive" but particularly the latter can be used as words of dispraise as well as praise. Politicians, for example, are sometimes accused of using "emotive language" when commentators wish to call their methods or their motives into question. There is, as was suggested at the beginning of this chapter, an ethical issue to be dealt with here. So let us first look briefly at the quality that we have evoked as the opposite to emotiveness—objectivity—and then consider the positive and negative aspects of emotiveness.ObjectivityThe word objectivity is used here to refer to an absence of emotional coloring or bias. The word neutrality would serve the purpose just as well and is often used in discussions of this topic, but since the word neutral has already been used in this book to denote a certain level of language and style, it seems best to avoid possible confusion by using objective and objectivity at this point.We all know that it is often very difficult to be objective about issues in real life. We can never wholly escape from ourselves. At the same time, we are all endowed with the capacity to see things from another person's point of view. One of the faculties that enables us to do this is that most important tool in a writer's equipment, his or her imagination. It takes imagination to stand outside yourself and see things from another perspective. It has been said several times already that the imagination is in one respect a faculty that adds life and color; it is elaborative and expansive. But imagination can also be a critical faculty. To see things as they are, rather than as they seem to us, is often thought to be the business of reason rather than the imagination, and a large part of being objective is being rational, but reason can sometimes only take us so far.Consider the following famous passage from Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854):"Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse." "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer. "Now, girl number twenty," said Thomas Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is." The irony in this passage, for those readers who have not read the novel, is that "girl number twenty," Sissy Jupe, is a child from the circus whose father is in charge of the horses that perform in the ring.If you were asked to define a horse or, to return to the terms of our argument, to give an objective description of a horse, how would you do it? The deficiencies of the "Bitzer" approach, which is a caricature of the approach adopted by reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias in general—compare "a large solid-hoofed herbivorous ungulate mammal (Equus caballus, family Equidae, the horse family) …" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition)—are obvious.But if you want to avoid a soulless list of facts and must also, in order to remain objective, avoid such approaches as personal experience:My first experience of horses came when I was three years old…. or personal opinion:A horse is a handsome and noble creature, gifted with strength and swiftness, and an ally of humankind since earliest times in the struggle for both subsistence and progress. then it requires a special effort both of your reason and knowledge and of your imagination to achieve that aim. Just as it takes imagination to use the neutral style effectively, so it takes knowledge to strip your vision of subjective elements and see things as they are or as they might appear to a disinterested observer.A large four-legged creature with a brown coat, a tuft of long dark hairs sprouting from its rear end and hair of a similar color hanging down along its neck, stopped nibbling the grass at its feet and raised its head to look at me. It then put itself into motion on its slim, graceful legs, lifting horny feet that had narrow bands of metal attached, and made its way leisurely toward me. It is not easy to describe a horse as a visitor from another planet might see it—nor, perhaps thankfully, is it a task that a writer is likely to be called upon to perform very often. But anyone who tries such an exercise will soon discover that it is quite a severe test of his or her powers of visualization and imagination, as well of his or her word power.The general key to objectivity, as to so much else, is simplicity. When you are required to be objective, use the simplest words you can. The unvarnished truth may not always be simple, but if you try to describe it in simple terms, you can at least ensure that it remains unvarnished.Now let us return to emotiveness.Emotive Language—the Positive AspectsNeither stark simplicity nor a dry recital of facts will suit every purpose. On many, if not most, occasions we will want our writing to have color and life and to produce a response in the reader.The journalist quoted in a previous subsection could have described her dining experience thus:a dish of local fromage fort—a mixture of fresh cheese, black pepper and white wine—had an enjoyably spicy taste. Instead she wrote:"the giant crock of fromage fort—a fiery, spicy, devilish mixture of fresh cheese, black pepper and white wine—made the palate tingle." Her aim was to suggest to her readers that she had had a really pleasurable and exciting experience and that the food was truly special, and to make them share, vicariously, some of the excitement and pleasure she felt. Hence, the fromage fort comes in a "giant crock," which suggests both generous portions and, through the use of the word crock, a countrified setting. She also piles on the adjectives "fiery, spicy, devilish" to usher in and justify the final evocative phrase "made the palate tingle."A word of any kind can be emotive. In the example just quoted, the adjectives do most of the work, and adjectives are usually the class of words to which we turn first in order to give atmosphere, color, or emotion to a passage. The bare sentenceA house stood on top of a hill. can be brought to various kinds of life by the addition of some adjectives and adjectival phrases:A weather-beaten house stood on top of a bare, windswept hill. A fine house of imposing size and appearance stood resplendent on top of a stately hill. But, if our intention is to add flesh to the bones of a sentence, we should consider varying the nouns and verbs as well.A flimsy dwelling teetered on top of a steep-sided crag. A splendid mansion looked out from a hilltop over the rich farmland spread at its feet. Some people might protest that what is being illustrated here is not "emotive language," properly speaking. It is simply "evocative language," the sort of lively descriptive language that no writer can possibly manage without. There is no sense in which describing a house as "weather-beaten" and standing on top of a "bare, windswept hill" constitutes an attempt to manipulate the reader any more than describing fromage fort as "fiery, spicy, and devilish" is an example of unscrupulous advertising. But that is only partly true. As has been said before, a crucial part of the writer's task is to set the reader's imagination to work, and it is through the reader's imagination that the writer reaches his or her feelings. Creating mood and atmosphere, imparting life and color, does involve a degree of manipulation, but—and it is a crucial but—the motive for that manipulation is essentially an innocent one, to increase the reader's pleasure.Emotive Language—the Negative AspectsIt is now time to look at the other side of the coin. In order to show that the process is similar on both the negative and the positive side, let us use the same technique of building up a simple sentence into something more emotive:A driver ran over my dog, Lucy. A hit-and-run driver mowed down my precious pet, Lucy. A drunken maniac in an automobile slaughtered my poor defenseless Lucy. In such instances, rather than adding adjectives and choosing more powerful verbs to add life and color to a report and give more pleasure to the reader, we are piling more and more emotional pressure on the reader to fuel his or her outrage against the driver and his or her sympathy with our sense of loss.If we write,More and more manufacturing jobs that used to be done in the United States are now being done overseas. we are making a sober statement of fact. If, on the other hand, we write,Foreign workers are stealing American jobs. we have produced a much snappier headline, but at the same time, through using the emotive word steal, we have changed the way in which we want the reader to perceive the process that is taking place. Theft is, after all, a crime. If someone steals your job, you have a right to feel aggrieved. It would, we might say, be hypocritical of someone to write such a sentence and then protest innocence of any wish to arouse resentment among American workers against their foreign counterparts.Now, there is plenty of wickedness at work in the world. There are callous hit-and-run drivers who kill animals and people and try to avoid responsibility for their actions. People do lose their jobs as a result of criminal or immoral behavior on the part of others. Writers should never be afraid of calling things by their proper names or arousing emotions in their readers for or against people or causes that they believe are either beneficial or detrimental to society. What writers ought not to do, however, is to whip up emotion purely for the sake of it.When you write about an issue using emotive language, you are, in effect, prejudging it. You know how you view the issue and you know how you want others to view it. But there may be occasions where you genuinely wish to leave the reader free to make up his or her own mind or where you feel that the justice of your own cause is so transparently obvious that your best course is to present the facts of the case in a plain unemotive manner, for the reader cannot fail to come to what is, from your point of view, the right conclusion. Remember that a conclusion or a decision that a person reaches through his or her reasoning and insight is, on the whole, likely to be more firmly fixed than one that he or she has been persuaded into by somebody else. You should be able to recognize emotive language and be able to write objectively so as to be able to avoid that kind of language for that very reason.If you find that you have written,This policy will bring untold benefits to millions of people all around the world who are languishing in the direst poverty. consider whether it might not be more accurate, and more honest, to write,This policy is intended to bring relief to poor people in many countries. Similarly, consider whetherThe tyrant's fall was greeted with general rejoicing by the population he had so long oppressed and enslaved. They poured into the streets to welcome the liberators as they made their triumphal ride to the gates of the presidential palace. actually represents what tends to happen at the end of a war. A more restrained account, avoiding emotive clichés, rings considerably truer:Large crowds turned out to greet the liberating forces as they rode through the capital to the presidential palace. Many seemed almost bewildered to find themselves free at last of a brutal and oppressive regime. There were tears amid the jubilation as the liberators passed by. Finally, with regard to the negative aspects of emotive language, the saying of Less is more applies to emotive language as much as to any other type of language use for special effect. If people feel that they are being badgered or bullied into a certain point of view, that you are trying to subject them to emotional blackmail, or that you are writing with excessive emotion, they may very well react against your views. Readers can be manipulated, for good purposes or ill, but they do not enjoy the feeling that they are being manipulated.
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