The Post Carbon Institute named climate hawk Paul Gilding a “Climate & Business Fellow” last week. But how could PCI best draw attention to that?

Tod Brilliant, PCI’s Strategy & Communications Director, had just finished my book, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga. It has a long discussion of the importance of headline-writing in successful online communications and the importance of using the figures of speech in those headlines.

Brilliant was inspired to come up with this gem of irony for the news release: “Obscure Expert Joins Little Known Think Tank to Battle Issues Most Prefer to Ignore.”

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media liked it so much, they did an entire post on it, “Seen a Better Headline than This One from Post Carbon Institute? Not Likely.” They say of this “satirical headline” that “It’s a sure way to attract attention, perhaps even some news coverage, for a release that otherwise would have landed with just a thud.”

The whole point of the figures of speech is to be memorable: They were, after all, developed by the great bards like Homer to help them remember long epic poems — and to make the ...

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