« Blogging -- Real life | Main | Gotta love a premium »

July 07, 2005

Yes AND So

We've written a lot about how the words "Yes" "But" "So" can really work as the outline to any kind of persuasive arguement you want to make.

• "Yes", establishing empathy, understanding of your audience's situation.
• "But" pivoting to the challenge, allowing for disagreement or change
• "So" introducing your conclusion

Sounds good and works, in most cases. But recently my wife pointed out that while the word "Yes" is great, and really helps lower your audience's (in this case our pleading son's) inherent resistance, the word "But" can bring that resistance right back up.

"But" can signal "oh yeah, here it comes, the negative, the disagreement, the disappointment..." So, in her dramatically greater sensitivity and wisdom, she said why not use the word "AND" instead? In most cases it accomplishes the same thing in terms of your arguement but it doesn't raise hackles.

Why tell someone "Yeah, yeah I see your point, but you're wrong, so I have a better idea?" Just to make them mad and more resistant. Maybe in some cases, but that is not usually what you are trying to do in marketing. Instead, why not say, "Yes, I see where you are coming from. And, we could take that further. So, lets come to the following conclusion together."

Yes, I see my wife's point, and she is generally right. So, let's take it a little further...

• Yes, "And" and "But" are both coordinating conjunctions: "joining two items of equal syntactic importance" (part of the group "for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so" that form the mnemonic FANBOYS) - i.e. in structural logic terms they mean exactly the same thing.
• And, my wife is right that "But" also can connote negativity - "Implies that the following clause is contrary to prior belief."
• So, "with the result or consequence that," although I frankly think "But" works better than "And" in the above arguement, I am going to use "And" instead whenever I talk to my wife because it works better for her. And besides S.O. is also an abbreviation for "Significant Other" and I want to keep it that way.

And if all the above contortions of "And" and "But" wasn't confusing enough, here are a bunch of links to others I found googling "Yes But So":

• A whole blog called Yes But Still - very nice statement that "life is what happens when your reading aphorisms" (remember if you can't be a poet...)
• "Yes saddam is evil but.." Boy, what do you follow that with?
• Yes, But Why Are the Grammys So Awful? Got me, maybe it's a requirement for awards ceremonies and political conventions.
• Living Longer, yes! But living well? - Hey, eat drink and be merry!!
  (Simple measures that will help keep you healthy)
• Yes, But Is Weight Loss the Be-All and the End-All? I certainly hope not
• Yes, character counts, but so does winning. Hey, wait a minute I thought that was my excuse for getting picked last for the football team.

Note: there were almost no entries for "Yes And So" Hmmmm....

Posted by johnza at July 7, 2005 04:33 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.geekfishing.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1517

Comments

Post a comment