vocabulary - Is there a way to measure how "emotive" a verb is?

I've read that "People buy on emotion and justify with logic" and that, when writing sales copy, one should use "emotive" words.

Now understand my background is intensely technical and, while I can bang out a well-written technical manual without a second thought, I am struggling with verbs that "arouse intense feeling" especially since I am selling something (software) where technical precision matters. My goal is to connect emotionally with my prospects (using strong verbs of moderate comprehension complexity) while still weaving such emotion around the technical fabric of my actual business.

So my question: is there a clear method to know where a particular verb falls on the spectrum of emotional to logical?

Consider this construct: "Ever feel like your business ...". Ok, "feel" is clearly an emotive verb, but it's weak. Replace that with "Ever suspect your business...". Now "suspect" is a stronger verb, but is it emotive? Probably, it's about trust. But another synonym is "reckon", which is getting closer to "measuring", which is logical. And going further to "calculate" we're clearly in logical territory.

So when I choose a stronger verb, is there a clear technical way to know the emotional impact of the verb, or do I just need to tap into my inner emotional self and take off this logical hat?

Answer

The short answer to your question is "no" the longer answer is "we're working on it." The rabbit hole here gets very deep but it also a really exciting aspect of modern language. Deciding that one word sounds better than another is something that human beings do millions of times when writing. No one sits down and parses through a thesaurus, analyzes historical context, looks for similar usages and then, based on this process, plucks the perfect word out of a list of 30 that mean the same thing. Yet people somehow make these choices all the time and generally agree that some writing feels 'better' or more 'eloquent' than other writing, without being able to pin down exactly why.

One paper that doesn't do exactly what you are looking for, but shows how it might be done is this study of politeness in language done by Stanford another project by the same department is a program that does the exact opposite of what you are looking for (it converts language to logical axioms). Some commercial software can also gauge the degree to which words are positive or negative or find underlying psychological associations with certain terms. These are largely directed towards marketing analysis and other more profitable fields so they often cost a ton.