Prioritize the Positive

As we've seen with loaded language, word choice can have a psychological impact on the reader. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab explains that you want to “stress what something is rather than what it is not,” and emphasize what your program or project “can and will do rather than what it cannot.”

For example, when writing a proposal to provide job search training to unemployed individuals, one wouldn't want to write that the program will “decrease the number of people who don't have jobs.” A more effective sentence would emphasize a positive trend and use positive wording by stating that the program will “increase the number of people who have jobs.”

Though the meanings of both statements are exactly the same, the psychological effect is slightly different. People react positively to positive language.

Look for negative language in your writing and, wherever possible, change it to mean the same thing by using affirmative language. Words to look for include “no,” “none,” and “not” (including words using the apostrophe-t contraction,...