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Think Mr. Buffett is plain-spoken? Listen closer and hear a rhetorical master. 

By Jay Heinrichs

At the core of every love letter, thank-you note, e-mail, essay, or presentation is a compact, magnetic set of words that makes everything else fall into place. It’s the takeaway, the payoff, one that’s rarely more than a dozen words. Do it right, and it bookmarks your thoughts in people’s minds.

You might be thinking: Sure. Bumper sticker writing.

But I’m not talking about that. For one thing, how many  bumper stickers have you read that actually say something?

            My Other Car Is a Horse

            I Heart Wolfhounds

            Eat Bertha’s Mussels

I could go on, but you get the point. Most bumper sticker writing doesn’t deliver any point, other than self-expression. But that doesn’t mean all short writing is worthless. Focus on a dozen words or less, and you focus your thoughts as well.

That skill might be useful if you’re on Twitter—there’s even a site, besttweets.com, devoted to the art of micro-elegance—but I’m not talking about short writing for the sake of short writing, either. I’m talking about short writing for the sake of persuasion. Persuasion’s first requirement is to create words and images that people can’t help but remember.

The most effective, and obnoxious, way to get your words to stick in people’s heads is to repeat them over and over and over. TV advertisers practice this hammerhead technique. But there are better ways to get your words to stick than simply repeating them. You can achieve the same thing by putting a few great words in the right place. People can remember words only when they’re unusual somehow—unexpected, or arranged in a striking order. The right words, arranged perfectly, leave a lasting impression in an audience’s brain. And what are the techniques to create this magic? Figures of speech.

You’ve heard of them, and usually not in a nice way. People use “It’s just a figure of speech” to excuse whatever boneheaded thing they just said. That’s a bad rap for some of the most useful persuasion tools ever invented. The ancient Greeks called them “schemes,” a better word than “figures,” because they serve as persuasive tricks and rules of thumb. While Shakespeare had to memorize more than 200 of them in grammar school, the basic ones aren’t hard to learn. Besides, you already use plenty of figures—analogy (“peace like a river”), oxymoron (“deafening silence”), the rhetorical question (Do I have to explain this one?), hyperbole (the most incredibly overblown figure of all), and the parenthesis (like this one).

The biggest problem with figures is that most of them come with Greek names as their official labels. But you don’t have to spout that Harry Potter’s He Who Must Not Be Named is a periphrasis. It’s the techniques that count, not the names.

In fact, really smart people use them instinctively. Take Warren Buffett. Investors read his annual Berkshire Hathaway Chairman’s Letter like it was Moses’ tablets from on high, mostly to enjoy his wit and wisdom. Well, OK, mostly to glean the secrets of the world’s savviest investor. But how many investment letters get quoted for decades afterward? Buffett’s do, because he’s a wizard at figures, the rhetorical as well as the business kind.

In his 2004 letter he said that a timely investor is one who’s “fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” That’s a first-class chiasmus, though I doubt that Buffett would use the term. I call it the criss-cross figure. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price,” Buffett said. Nice criss-cross. President Kennedy used the figure when he urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Knute Rockne: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Figures really work. If Rockne had used plain language—“The hardest times show just who’s tough”—it wouldn’t be the beloved cliché it is today. Try it yourself: It’s not a question of whether we’re against Google. It’s whether Google is against us.

Besides using snazzy ways to change the usual word order, Buffett also likes one of my own favorite devices: taking clichés literally. Here’s a quote from a panel discussion he did in 2008: “I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.” See what he did? He took the cliché, “an idiot can run it,” and imagined that it wasn’t a cliché at all. Why prefer something that an idiot can run, if an idiot will never run it?

Here’s another Buffet cliché-bender, from a talk he gave to MBA students in 2003: “I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.” Oldest cliché in the book. But Buffett was trying to illustrate that he liked a sure investment to be even surer. And what’s a surer thing than fish in a barrel of water? Fish in a barrel without water.

When illustrating how underlings tend to come up with projections that justify a CEO’s foolish acquisition, Buffett undermined the cliché, “the emperor has no clothes”: “Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked.” You, too, can talk like Warren Buffett! Next time you hear someone argue against a new direction with “Let’s not change horses in mid-stream,” answer, “Even if your horse can’t swim?”

And Buffett knows the figure that defines terms to get the upper hand in an argument. “Price is what you pay,” he said. “Value is what you get.” It reminds me of the late, lamented cartoon strip “Shoe,” when the son asks his journalist dad, “Why are you staring out the window when you should be working? Start pounding the keyboard.” Dad answers, “Typists pound keyboards. Writers stare out windows.”

If you really want to achieve immortality, though, talk like Yogi Berra, the man who famously said “If you find a fork in the road, take it,” and “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” When you abandon logic to achieve a higher wisdom: That’s a figure called a yogism. Warren Buffett is good at this, too. “Occasionally,” he said, “a man must rise above principles.” You have to love a man like that—and people do.

Easy for me and Warren to say, right? Well, writing figuratively does take practice. One way to do it is to take an expression you admire and see how it varies from plain ordinary speech. Take a quote you like, and then write it as you’d say it. I call this technique “unwriting.” Take, for instance, another Buffett quote:

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Next, unwrite it:

“You should be skeptical of number crunchers and their computer models.”

Now ask yourself how Buffett’s quote varies from the unwritten version. As he likes to do, he twisted a cliché—“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” The old saying probably occurred to him when he was thinking of computer geeks: Hmmm. Beware of geeks… Beware of geeks bearing…um, formulas! As I say, it takes practice. If you really want to know about figures, take a look at my website, figarospeech.com. The site “rips the innards out of current quotes and reveals their rhetorical tricks and pratfalls.”

Meanwhile, you’ve already learned one secret to being Warren Buffett: Speak figuratively. All you have to do now is become an investment wizard and make more money than anybody in the world except Bill Gates. Personally, I haven’t even figured out mutual funds yet. But you have to start somewhere.

Jay Heinrichs is Spirit’s editorial director. He’s writing his next book, Word Hero, for Random House.