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Overview

When describing yourself and the world around you, you would think that nouns and adjectives are more important. However, there is a group of words called articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions that actually reveal your personality traits better than other types of words. These words include I, she, it, the, to, but, for. In this article we’ll learn why these seemingly insignificant words can say so much about our emotional state or credibility. They even predict how well groups collaborate!

In this article, you’ll also learn about pronouns and how they can reveal mental health issues. You will find out whether it’s men or women who use more I-words and if people are lying when they use them.

Big Idea #1: One of the first language analysis computer programs showed that analyzing language style yields great insights.

Humans have been communicating through spoken language for over 100,000 years. It was only about 95,000 years ago that they started writing as well. In the last 150 years or so we’ve developed technology like the telegraph and telephone to facilitate communication even more. Language is an important part of what makes us human but how we use it says a lot about who we are as people.

The author created a computer program to analyze language.

The author was interested in finding out whether people who had experienced serious trauma could improve their mental health by putting their experiences to paper. He and his research team needed a way to analyze the essays that his patients produced, so they created a computer program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC. The idea was to tally all the words in these essays that related to specific psychological concepts. For example, the program might find words that relate to anger, such as hate, rage, kill or revenge, and then tally them up.

Finally, the program would calculate the percentage of words associated with different psychological states. The findings revealed that those who used more positive words, such as love, care and happy, were the ones whose mental health improved.

The study revealed more than just the patients’ mental well-being.

In the 1990s, a graduate student of the author’s had an idea: what if they analyzed essays differently? Instead of focusing on nouns, verbs and adjectives to analyze content, they could instead focus on words that revealed writing style. These include pronouns, prepositions and articles.

The author was intrigued by how people used first-person pronouns, such as I and me, so he decided to analyze all the TED presentations and note their use of these types of words. He found that the more people switched between I-words (such as I), you-words (such as you), we-words (such as we), she-words, they – words, etc., the healthier those speakers were over time.

Big Idea #2: Style words are easy to overlook, but nonetheless provide a window into our social skills.

There are many different words. Some of them serve a purpose to convey information, while others help with grammar.

Generally, words can be divided into two categories: content and style. Content words are the main substance of a sentence, while style words are the supporting structure that gives sentences their form.

Function words are small and often overlooked—yet they’re absolutely critical for writing for maximum impact. They include articles, prepositions, conjunctions and so on. Function words hold sentences together in meaningful ways; without them ideas can stop making sense or even cease to exist! But function words can do a lot more too; by themselves they don’t convey meaning the way content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives do. When you string several function-words together your brain perceives those passages differently than if you were to ignore all the little “helper” words altogether.