Sharing is caring unless you’re sharing a few thoughts.
And then it’s exhausting for us and a wasted opportunity for you.
Buried in your thoughts may well be an idea that’ll make our world a better place. But we’re not waiting around to hear about your big idea if you can’t cut to the chase.
“Effective communication hinges on one job and one job only: moving your point from your head to your audiences,” says Joel Schwartzberg, author of Get to the Point: Sharpen Your Message and Make Your Words Matter.
“That’s the ball game. If you deliver your point, you succeed. If you don’t deliver your point, you fail – even if you’re otherwise hilarious, friendly, attractive, relatable, admirable, knowledgeable and likable.”
If you struggle to get your ideas into other people’s heads, you likely suffer from a fatal yet fixable flaw. “It’s a flaw that contributes directly to nervousness, rambling and, ultimately, epic failure, and most speakers have no idea that this flaw is ruining their presentations,” says Schwartzberg. “They don’t have a point. They have what they think is a point, but it’s actually something much less. Without a point, everything you say is pointless.”
Schwartzberg says we lose audiences when we confuse a point with a theme, topic, title, catchphrase or half-baked idea. “None of these are actual points. A point is a contention you can propose, argue, defend, illustrate and prove. A point makes clear its value and its purpose. And to maximize its impact, a point should be sold, not just shared or described.”
To help find your point and sharpen your message, Schwartzberg has a three-step test.
Start by tacking “I believe that” to the front end of your point. Do you have a complete sentence that makes sense?
The “so what” test saves you from peddling weak and self-evident truisms that’ll bore your audience. “You can tell if your point is too shallow or a truism by asking two questions,” says Schwartzberg. “Is there a reasonable counterpoint? Can I spend more than a minute defending this point?”
And the “why” test purges your point of meaningless and lazy words, or what Schwartzberg calls badjectives. “These are generic adjectives that only add dead weight to your point. When we say something is ‘great’ or ‘very good’, there’s little indication of scale, reason or specific meaning. Yet speeches and written reports – and more than a few tweets – are often loaded with badjectives.” So instead of saying something’s important, tell us why it matters and why we should care.
Now more than ever, we need to be kind to our colleagues by cutting to the chase in our presentations, conversations, meetings, emails and voicemails. All of us are running on fumes 11 months into the pandemic. And none of us have the patience or mental bandwidth to hop on a slow train taking the scenic route to nowhere. So if you truly care, please don’t share. Just get to the point and stick the landing.
Jay Robb serves as communications manager for McMaster University’s Faculty of Science, lives in Hamilton and has reviewed business books for the Hamilton Spectator since 1999. This review first ran in the Feb. 13 edition of the Hamilton Spectator.
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