Adapted from “The Perils of Powerful Speech,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Death to modifiers! All hail the active verb. Be succinct.

Those are Strunk and White’s commandments for simple and direct writing. They also may be rules for establishing verbal power in negotiation—though not always, it turns out.

Linguistic studies have shown that hesitations (ums and

Adapted from “What Negotiators Can Learn from Improv Comedy,” by Lakshmi Balachandra (lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management) and Michael Wheeler (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

You’re onstage without a script, relying on your mind and wits to come up with lines and actions that advance the game. Should you trust

Adapted from “Fickle Intuition,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

When it comes to trusting others, negotiators often rely on their gut instincts. Recent studies indicate, however, that extraneous factors can sway such judgments. For example, Michael Kosfeld and other University of Zurich researchers introduced a twist in a classic trust game in which subjects must