In this age of information overload, being clear and concise is a valuable skill. And when you speak in public, it is even more important; you need to be heard and understood quickly, before you lose your audience’s attention.
How can you convey your main points without overwhelming your audience with too much detail and irrelevant information?
Here are some pointers:
Plan before you speak: If you’re using a slide deck in a presentation, make sure you know the main point in each slide. Practice saying it without using too many words.
Know what you THINK so you know what to say: When you have a clear viewpoint on something, it is much easier to express yourself verbally on the topic.
Give the ‘headline’ first. Start your talk or point with the most important idea – your headline. Next, give the key arguments to support your idea and after that, any necessary supporting details. This way of structuring information is often referred to as the ‘Pyramid Principle’. Check out this great video for more details:
Avoid unnecessary details. Only give details that the listener needs to know, that they care about. Unless it is directly relevant, the listener probably doesn’t need to know the life history of someone in your story. Leave out these types of details.
Use active descriptions. Choose simple, meaningful words that say a lot. Stay away from passive sentence constructions, such as “Olive oil is produced”. Use sentences with the active voice instead, e.g. ‘Spain produces an amazing amount of olive oil’.
Use signposting phrases. These are phrases that guide your listener through a longer piece of communication and act as ‘signposts’. An example is ‘My first point is…’ or ‘In summary…’. For a list of useful signposting phrases, click here.
Pay attention to HOW you speak. Start listening to how long it takes you to get to the point. This will help you start thinking about where you can cut words when you speak. Reflect on the following questions:
- Do people often ask you to repeat yourself?
- Do you often use “What I mean is…” when speaking to clarify your points?
- Do you use a lot of filler words such as “um” and “err”?
Practice speaking concisely. A quick and effective practice routine is to listen to your voice text messages after you’ve sent them. How concisely did you speak? Were there many ‘filler sounds’ – “ums” and errs.”? Did you articulate the words well?
Speaking clearly and concisely may come easy to some people, but for most of us, it’s a skill that we need to be constantly working on.
An acronym from the communication skills world that you might find useful to adopt as a mantra to help you develop the skill of speaking clearly is KISS –
Keep It Short & Simple
