How To Find Emotional Value of Your Story
You can change your words to reach your desired emotional appeal
The viral stories move you. When you are reading them, you are intensely engaged. It happens because the writer creates a connection with you on an emotional level.
What if I told you that there is an AI — Artificial Intelligence — that can tell you your story’s emotional value — as a number? Green is positive emotions and red is negative emotions?
Companies are using this type of AI to monitor and understand reviews and customer feedback. They don’t need to read thousands of reviews on their site or Facebook. The companies get a score about how the customers feel about the pricing plan or after-sale services.
Since your story is your product, you can check its emotion score as well. You can then choose to change some of the words — if you like.
Sentiment score and magnitude
As I was playing with the demo of this AI, I pasted my last story — How To Have a Big O When You Write — to get a score. In less than a second, I got lots of information:
It tells you that on a scale of 0–1, my story is +0.55, and the sentiment is positive. The magnitude of sentiment tells us about the volume of expressed emotions. My story has a magnitude of 12.14 — on a scale of 0 — ∞.
Choice of words
That is not all. The AI tells you a lot about the words you used. Since it uses your word choice to reach the emotional score. It highlights the words with negative emotional polarity in red color. Words with positive emotional polarity are green. Lighter and darker shades of green tell you about the intensity of positive emotion a word presents:
Themes in your story
The AI assigns sentiment scores and magnitudes to the themes it detects. It is trying to categorize your content based on the selection of words. For example, it is noticing that I am talking about ‘writing well,’ ‘more engaging writing,’ and ‘becoming a bestseller.’ It uses these themes to understand what the article is trying to say:
Detected keywords
The AI is also trying to notice the keywords. If you want to change any words that may be misrepresenting your story’s emotional appeal, you can easily detect those words and change them. For example, I could probably change ‘mental,’ and ‘believe.’
It tries to categorize your work
Here the AI has correctly recognized that my story has something to do with Books & Literature.
Artificial Intelligence learns fast
The more people use an AI, the more it learns. If lots of people, around the globe, use this AI, it’ll be able to more accurately analyze the stories and articles.
How it can help you
Since it is difficult to see if your story has an emotional appeal — before you publish it — you can use this tool. This tool may not be perfect, but it gives you some idea of the sentiment value.
Since many companies are using these tools for customer sentiment analysis, you can assume that the tool has some real value.
Final thoughts
I analyzed three more stories with the tool — before it stopped me from doing more analysis. It’s not free for life.
One story, with 100+ hours of reading time, 4 Things Years of Porn Addiction Has Done to Me, had a -0.64 score with lots of red color. Another story with 10+ hours, 4 Einstein Traits That Led To His Colossal Success, had a -0.60 score.
You’ll have to spend an hour, pasting and evaluating your text, before you see what this tool can do for you. There is a character limit for the free account.
If you learn to use this tool, there is a greater chance that your stories will have words that touch the hearts of your readers.
You can read my curated stories here.
