How to Leverage Sensory Language in Your Blog Posts [Data + Expert Tips]

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"You're sitting in the creaky, mesh-backed, black ergonomic desk chair you bought at a discount off Amazon — hunched over, eyes reluctantly wide open, staring intently at a dimly lit laptop screen bearing a blank document.

It's 4:45 PM. For most of the day, you've heard hardly anything except for the occasional click-clack of keys to commit some fruitless inspiration to your blog post and the intermittent spells of grating silence that came after deleting everything you jotted down.

您大约两个小时前喝咖啡的持久味道已经变酸，但仍然涂上舌头和嘴巴的屋顶。您可以感觉到咖啡因的作用正在缓慢减弱。微妙的肌肉疲劳正在凝固。您的眼睑很重，这本身就是一场挣扎，以防止它们遮住您酸痛，疲倦的眼睛。

Your mind has gone stagnant — trapped in the clutches of what's most commonly known aswriter's block."

现在，我喜欢认为这段经文是生动的和身临其境的，这主要是对我使用的语言和我所玩过的个人感觉的一种荣誉 - 特别是它如何描述sensoryexperiences of the subject matter.

该语言最常被称为感官语言，它是任何作家理解和应用的强大资源。在这里，我们将介绍什么是感官语言，查看围绕它的一些数据，并介绍如何在博客文章中使用它。

感觉语言用于描述五个主要感官 - 触摸，视觉，声音，气味和味道。它们最常用于传达场景的特定细节或为概念描述添加更具想象力的元素。

感觉语言是最常见的伴随literature. It's a central component of most fiction and poetry, but that doesn't mean this kind of vocabulary is exclusively artistic in its application. Marketers stand to gain a lot from understanding how to leverage it as well.

Let's take a look at some of the data on sensory language to get a better picture of why it's effective and how to apply it.

What Data Says About Sensory Language

我们的日常体验是多感的，但这很难在语言上捕捉。

查尔斯·斯宾斯（Charles Spence）的2012年研究, published in科学直接，确定“我们的大多数日常经历都是多感官的”。当我们感知周围的世界时，很少（如果有的话）很少是我们的感官。

That said, the English language is limited in its ability to capture that phenomenon and general sensory overlap. In his bookSensory Linguistics: Language, Perception, and Metaphor, linguist Bodo Winter, explains those limitations by describing the experience of eating Kimchi.

他说：“这种经历涉及胡椒粉和大蒜味的咸和辛辣的混战，这些味道激发了味蕾，在发酵的气味上，刺痛的口感和松脆的咀嚼声。”

Though his description is vivid and engaging, he notes that "conveying this experience forces the use of decoupled sensory adjectives such as salty and crunchy. The compression inherent in these words, each one singling out one aspect of the experience, means that the simultaneity of the multisensory taste experience cannot be conveyed."

This passage helps illustrate what might be the main challenge that comes with using sensory language. Ultimately, the goal is to capture a seamless multisensory experience, but the language you have at your disposal is mostly categorized by individual senses.

味道和气味是最难描述的感觉。

The five senses are essentially tiered when it comes to expressing them linguistically. Certain senses are more ineffable — or difficult to put into words — than others.

A 2014study fromStephen LevinsonandAsifa Majid, published in the journalMind and Language，发现“至少在英语中，语言上代码的颜色通常比（非音乐）声音更容易，声音比口味比气味更容易。”

每个人的感觉感知都不同，但是我们如何单独体验味觉和气味（也称为“化学感官”）是特别独特的。

A landmark 1990 studyin the journalPhysiology and Behaviorfound that the number of taste buds humans have on their tongues can vary radically from person to person. It's also been found taste and smell vary as a function of factors like age, gender, and culture.

简而言之，很难捕捉如此个人的感官本质，反过来又无法言喻。英语对感官的有限词汇并不能使事情变得更容易。

As Winter puts it, "Detailed descriptive characteristics of smells are not encoded in the English lexicon." Instead, smell is often described in terms of perceived pleasantness through words like芳香and泼辣.

It might seem like taste and smell have less practical application in marketing — especially when it comes to elements like blog copy — but don't count them out. You can get a lot of mileage out of those senses if you can convey them articulately and compellingly.

对味道和气味的感知比其他感觉更具情感性。

Though these senses are harder to capture, it's in your best interest to try when appropriate. Sensory language is used to invoke meaningful images and feelings. And research indicates that language describing taste and smell bear more emotional weight than other kinds of sensory language.

As Winter puts it,“味道和气味（作为感官）在感知中更具情感性，与其他感官的单词相比，相关的单词也更加情感……到目前为止，已经有大量的融合证据证明了口味的情感。和闻到语言”

This point can mean a lot in the context of certain schools of marketing. If you can believe it,emotionallycharged and compelling language can be an asset to a company'semotionalmarketingefforts.

And if you're interested in using sensory language in your copy in the interest of that cause, it's worth having a pulse on which aspects of the concept are the mostemotionallyevocative.

Multisensory language makes for better marketing.

正如我提到的那样，我们对周围世界的看法始终是多感官的，因此直观地假设我们自然而然地接受了反映这类体验的营销。并且有关该主题的数据与该概念一致。

A 2009 study published in The Journal of Consumer Researchfocused on how multisensory advertising impacted subjects' perceptions of taste. It found that multisensory ads result in higher taste perception than ads focusing on taste alone.

And while the study focused primarily on multisensory advertising's impact on a single sense,other researchershave extrapolated upon its findings and assumed it applies to the other senses as well.

What does this tell us? Well, this means that multisensory marketing — supported by tactful use of sensory language — is more engaging and enriching than marketing that focuses solely on conventionally touched-on senses like sight or sound. It shows that there's tremendous value to using a robust sensory vocabulary in your copy.

How to Use Sensory Language in Your Blog Posts

Understand when it's appropriate to use.

First and foremost, you need to understand that sensory language can seem awkward and jarring when you force it in certain contexts that don't necessarily warrant it.

例如,如果您正在编写一个实事求是的,professional post about a business concept, you probably wouldn't want to use sensory language while defining it.

Take this definition from a HubSpot blog aboutstrategy consulting:

“战略咨询是当商人（通常是高管，董事会或管理层）引入第三方提供外部，专家的商业挑战的观点。战略顾问通常具有大量行业知识，并有望客观地评估高级业务问题他们对公司正在处理的特定问题进行了整体研究，并就如何接近他们提供建议。”

It's more appropriate to keep that aspect of the article more straightforward and professional. Overloading it with sensory language might undermine your ability to clearly establish what the concept is. That said, there are ways you could incorporate sensory language to bring that dry concept to life and make it engaging.

Add a narrative element to the post.

Even though sensory language might not be the best way to convey the more rigid, objective aspects of your post, you can still use it to qualify and illustrate certain concepts. One of the best ways to do that is by giving your piece some narrative flair.

This method gives you some space to use sensory language and make concepts more engaging and entertaining. Here's an example of how you could do that when covering the concept of strategy consulting I just described above:

"Picture this: A CEO sits, poised in a high-backed pleather chair at the head of an engineered wood conference table, eyes shut tight with a cast of stuffy, sharply suited board members flanking the table's sides. They look on intently — expressions caught somewhere between frustration and desperation.

The smell of stale coffee and the special kind of silence that only comes after an hour or so of beratement hang in the air. Day has turned to night out the floor to ceiling windows without any resolution about how to amend the company's recent marketing campaign — the one that's been trending on social media for all the wrong reasons.

The CEO finally opens their eyes, and in a tone that's equal parts stern and exhausted, they say it: 'We need to bring someone in.'

输入战略顾问。”

With that kind of description, I was able to set the stage, capture reader attention, and pave the way for a more thorough description of what a strategy consultant does.

使用隐喻或比喻。

这一点在一定程度上与上面的一个联系在一起。有时，您要写的主题太干了，无法从拼写中拼出叙事，而不是拼命地强制感觉语言，而这种语言自然而然地凝结了。

In those cases, it can help to use metaphors or similes — rife with sensory language and vivid description — to simultaneously engage and inform the reader. For instance, let's imagine you're writing a piece aboutquote graphics. You might want to incorporate something like this:

"Think of your quote as the entree to aMichelin starmeal — an immaculate cut of filet mignon that tastes like heaven and cuts like butter.

这是菜的核心，它本身就是美味，但是一些配菜和“吃饭优先”的演示文稿会将其提升到另一个水平。通过在盘子里充满酥脆，金色的土豆和完美烧焦的布鲁塞尔芽菜，您可以从“有趣的是点菜”中取出菜肴，到“真正的五星级”。

That's the fundamental principle behind quote graphics. The engaging backdrop, distinctive font, and other engrossing visual elements you use can elevate your content and make it compellingly complete."

Though it might not always be obvious, you can often find ways to incorporate sensory language into your blog content. And when done tastefully and effectively, it can pay off in spades. So if you're interested in finding ways to add some oomph to your blog copy, consider taking some time to better understand sensory language.