Persuasive communication must be about what is heard, not jut about what is said.
As communicators, we tend to focus on what is said, because most everyone thinks that's what we do - we say things or help others say things. But the real value we should be offering is that we help other be heard, in the way they intended, by the people they are trying to reach.
And the starting point for figuring out what and how our audiences hear what is said to them is with frames of reference, an idea that has been around at least since Descartes put X and Y axes at right angles.
To understand anything, we need to relate it to something else we already know. These patterns of relationships between things are frames of reference. They are the schemes we use for organizing and interpreting our experiences. Frames of reference are the tools we use to figure out where each new experience fit and what each new experience means.
Frames are the patterns we use to understand the world - they are networks of definitions and connotation that are part of every experience.
We use them constantly, without consciously thinking about them. Frame of reference are embedded in everything we say and determine everything that our audiences hear.
Think of it this way: if I said to you "Here's the novel you're looking for," and hand you a book, the word "novel" begins to frame the way you think about the book and implies a huge amount of information - about the book's contents, the fact it is fiction, what you should expect from its characters, its length, etc. But if I said "play" or "dictionary," the connotations about the book would change. Your frame of reference would change.
Some of the relationships between the words "novel" and "book."
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