It's not what you say, it's what people hear
Frank Luntz gives a classic primer with his Words That Work
Masters in Public Affairs goes back to the foundational books in this field and extracts the principles that the best practitioners return to again and again. One book at a time.
“You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and pre-existing beliefs. It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listeners’ shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.”
That’s Frank Luntz, right at the top of Words That Work. And that passage should sting a little. Because most of us have been on the wrong side of it.
I’ve certainly had that moment. I craft what I think is a perfect message. Clear, accurate, well-supported. Send it out. And the response makes no sense. People heard something we didn’t say. They reacted to a meaning we didn’t intend. They filtered our words through beliefs we didn’t account for.
Luntz spent decades studying exactly this problem. His career was built on one observation: communication is determined by the receiver, not the sender. The quality of what you said is measured entirely by what the other person did with it after your words left your mouth.
He puts it in a way I keep coming back to: “The act of speaking is not a conquest, but a surrender.”
That’s a hard idea for people in our field. We think of communication as projection. We build messages, we push them out, we measure impressions and reach. Luntz is saying the opposite. The moment you speak, you’ve handed your words over to someone else’s brain. You’ve surrendered control of what they mean.
Why this book matters for practitioners
Words That Work was published in 2007. The political examples are dated. Luntz spends a lot of time on the 2004 election and Rudy Giuliani’s approval ratings — not all of which ages particularly well.
But the principles underneath those examples haven’t moved.
The receiver’s filter is still operating. People still process your words through their existing beliefs before those words arrive as meaning. Sequence still matters — the order you present information changes how people interpret it. Persona still determines credibility — what you demonstrate always outweighs what you claim. And single-word reframes still reshape entire categories of public perception.
What makes this book earn its place in the Masters in Public Affairs canon is where it sits relative to the other books we’ve covered:
In our first episode, we looked at Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which established that people respond to the pictures in their heads, not to reality itself.
In our second episode, David McRaney’s How Minds Change showed us the cognitive science behind why those pictures are so resistant to change — and that questions work better than arguments for shifting them.
Luntz takes both of those insights and builds a practitioner’s toolkit. He’s the bridge between understanding how opinion forms and knowing how to work with that formation process in real time. Lippmann diagnosed the problem. McRaney explained the science. Luntz shows you what to do about it in the campaign office.
That said, the book has an honest limitation worth naming. Luntz built his career on a specific empirical method — dial testing, instant-response focus groups, real-time language testing. The book almost entirely skips that methodology. You get the proven outputs without the process for generating your own. He gives you the answers from his lab. He doesn’t give you the lab manual.
His ten rules are useful defaults. They are not a substitute for doing the listening work with your own audience.
What we cover in the episode
Here’s what we get into:
The Kissinger story that captures the entire thesis in a single anecdote — how one word he didn’t choose undermined a decade of foreign policy.
The core idea that everything else in the book hangs from: communication is a receiver-side phenomenon. Your intentions don’t determine what people hear. Their existing mental pictures do.
The multi-layered mechanism Luntz describes — how words get filtered through the listener’s beliefs, how sequence changes meaning, how persona creates or destroys credibility, and how single-word reframes can restructure an entire industry’s public perception without changing the underlying product.
Four mental models for practitioners: the receiver’s filter, results over process, education before motivation, and consistency with freshness.
The common misunderstandings — including the honest limits of language, the line between reframing and spin, and why the ten rules are a starting point rather than a complete system.
Modern applications, including why the silence-equals-guilt principle matters more in the age of social media than it did when Luntz wrote this book.
And the mastery lesson: the best communicators are the best listeners. Your audience already has the language. Your job is to find it.
Listen and subscribe here:
Bonus: Ideas from the highlights that didn’t make the episode
Every episode requires cuts. Here are a few ideas from my reading notes that didn’t make it into the final script but are worth your time.
