Margins
Word Hero book cover
Word Hero
A Fiendishly Clever Guide to Crafting the Lines that Get Laughs, Go Viral, and Live Forever
2011
First Published
3.72
Average Rating
352
Number of Pages

Yes, it’s you can learn how to be a verbal wizard! Ever hear someone utter an unforgettable phrase and feel yourself reacting with with…well, awe? Ever read a great quote and think I could never come up with anything that clever ? Daunting as it may seem, there’s nothing mystical about witcraft. Crafting memorable lines doesn’t require DNA-encoded brilliance. What it does require is some knowledge of the tricks and techniques that make words stick. In Word Hero, Jay Heinrichs rescues the how-to of verbal artistry from cobwebbed textbooks and makes it entirely fresh– even a little mischievous. Fear on offer here are not dry, abstract ideas couched in academic jargon. Rather, Heinrichs takes you on an amusing – and amazingly helpful – tour of the mechanisms that make powerful language work. You’ll learn how to slyly plant your words in people’s heads and draw indelible verbal pictures by employing such tools as “crashing symbols,” “rapid repeaters,” “Russian Dolls” and even the powers of Mr. Potato Head. With those tools and others tucked in your utility belt, you might not immediately achieve “wordsmith immortality” but you will become a better speaker, writer, and raconteur…and long after people have forgotten everything else, they’ll remember your priceless lines.

Avg Rating
3.72
Number of Ratings
281
5 STARS
30%
4 STARS
28%
3 STARS
29%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Jay Heinrichs
Jay Heinrichs
Author · 5 books

Jay Heinrichs is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Thank You for Arguing, published in four editions and 14 languages. The leading modern work on rhetoric, it has been taught in more than 3,000 college rhetoric classes and countless AP English Language & Composition classes. Jay maintains the popular rhetoric and language websites ArgueLab.com and websites Figarospeech.com. In addition, he holds frequent Skype-ins with classes that use his book. When he’s not spreading the gospel of rhetoric, Jay conducts content strategies and persuasion workshops for clients as varied as the Wharton School of Business and NASA. Middlebury College named him a Professor of the Practice of Rhetoric and Oratory. Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine did a not altogether flattering portrait of him titled Jay Heinrichs’s Powers of Persuasion.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved