Creativity Tool: Spreading Synonyms

This article is one in a series of short articles describing practical creativity tools. The technique described in this article is especially good when you need to work on catchy names or slogans, impressive speeches, or other occasions in which your creativity has to be expressed through words.

Here are the steps you should take:

1. Write down the first version of the text you can come up with: Usually the first version of a name or slogan is not the best one you can come up with. However, writing it down is your first step towards working on it and coming up with many more creative options.

• Ex1B2Fample: the first slogan I think of for the invitation for a "historically flavored" dinner (see idea 1 on my ezinearticles.com article on Creative Ideas for Restaurant or Special Dinner for Friends - see link below*) is: "We eat to make history".
2. Find all the synonyms you can for the words in your sentence:
• Make a list of all the words that have the same or similar meaning to those that are in your original sentence.
• You may use a thesaurus or a software tool for finding the more special and less common phrases.
• Example: - Eat - consume, munch, devour, gulp down, swallow, taste, chew, feed/food; - Make - create, craft, build, prepare, assemble; - History - the past, old times, yesteryear, once upon a time.
3. Build new sentences with the synonyms:
• You can use the words on your list to come up with many variations of the original sentence.
• Remember to change the order of the words in order to come up with various patterns.
• You may keep some of the original words in your new phrases.
• Example: - Swallow the crafts of olden times. - Building a taste of the past. - How people made food...once upon a time. - Devouring the creations of history.
4. Choose one (or more) of the new sentences: Now you may choose the best of the new slogans, or use several variations on different places in order to keep things interesting (one on the front door, another on the menu, a third in the newspaper ad you make, etc.).

* Article on Creative Ideas for Restaurant or Special Dinner for Friends - see: http://ezinearticles.com/?Creative-Ideas-for-Restaurant-Service---Home-Dinner-for-Friends&id=420079

Amir Elion is a management and innovation consultant and facilitator. His Practical Creativity website on http://www.best100ideas.com includes numerous creativity and innovation tools. The tools and ideas on this article as well as other creative ideas in many fields and creativity tools, may be found on the free monthly Creative Ideas Newsletter: http://www.best100ideas.com/newsletter.shtml

Wishful Thinking