This is a piece I did for CAREEREALISM, which is an excellent website for anyone looking for a job or thinking of changing careers.

Few skills are more important for success at work and life than the ability to be persuasive and memorable. And yet the tricks for effective speaking and writing, which have been known for twenty-five centuries and verified by modern social science research, are hardly taught today.

As I explain in my book Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga, those tricks are the figures of speech, originally developed by the ancient bards like Homer to help them remember their epic poems and to make sure audiences would remember them.

Systematic use of the figures is the best way to be both pithy and profound. In this world of information overload, you have to capture people’s attention. In this media menagerie, you have to stand out like a peacock. Mastering the figures will help you grab people with the most eye-popping headlines, the catchiest catch-phrases, and the sweetest tweets.

Modern corporations have spent billions trying to hone in on which words will persuade people to remember and purchase their products. Their expensive studies have shown that the use of the figures “leads to more liking for the ad, a more positive brand attitude, and better recall of ad headlines.”

Advertising research finds that for certain figures, such as puns or metaphors, the act of decoding the figure, of figuring it out, “is necessary to produce its positive incremental effects on attitudes and memory.” The subtext is as important as the text.

Studies reveal that “virtually all of our abstract conceptualization and reasoning is structured by metaphor.” A single, well-crafted metaphor, like a well-crafted building, can endure for ages, as when Churchill said in 1946, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Lady Gaga, the first musician in history to reach one billion views on YouTube. Half of those views were from two songs, “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance,” which, not coincidentally, are both extended metaphors.

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Is your bracket busted? Perhaps you should have looked at that fourth seed’s carbon footprint instead of counting seniors and freshmen.

There are dozens of methods to filling out a March Madness bracket. You can pick based on the combat abilities of team mascots. Or by colors, or your devotion to the schools, or how much you like each city or region. Some people have even watched a game or two, and try to base their choices on a studied understanding of college basketball.

There’s a new approach that tries to answer the question, “What bracket would expend the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions?” It tells you which teams could get to the championship using the most carbon-neutral path.

Hint: going to school near tournament sites helps a lot. The analysis, conducted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, bases their calculation on projected team and fan travel between the school and the tournament site, combined with the assumption that higher seeds will draw larger fan bases. Though traveling by plane rather than coach bus means a higher carbon footprint, fan travel represents a much higher impact than team travel.

So how’d they do? Louisville, Davidson, Northwestern State, and Mississippi filled out this bracket’s Final Four, with each team’s journey projected to emit nearly 152,000 metric tonnes of CO2. St. Mary’s had the largest projected footprint, with a little over 166k. Florida Gulf Coast ranks 50 out of 68. Both Wichita State and Lasalle snuck into the top half of the pool ranked 33 and 31, respectively.

The women’s bracket got the same treatment as the men’s, with Maryland, Tennessee Chattanooga, Baylor, and LSU representing the carbon-friendly Final Four and UCLA bringing up the rear.

I spoke to Joe Marriott at Booz Allen, who worked on this analysis, to ask him more about how he did the analysis and what it means.

Q. Did you find yourself rooting for teams based on their carbon footprint?

A. After doing the analysis, it’s hard not to. I taught at the University of Pittsburgh for a few years, so I was rooting for them until they lost in the first round. Ironically, I’ve been so busy with our carbon footprint analysis of the tournament that I’ve paid less attention to my own bracket. The Louisville story, being a tournament favorite and having a small carbon footprint, has made following them pretty compelling.

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Opine away.