Impress Your Audience with the Quality of Your Ideas

Just yesterday, I felt myself getting wound-up in an otherwise friendly conversation with one of my fellow Toastmasters.

We were talking about using complicated vocabulary and sentence structure in speeches, and I had been advising him to simplify, simplify, simplify. Like so many intelligent people, he resisted. The conversation ended when I half-screamed:

"Impress people with the quality of your ideas, not the complexity of your words!"

While I left a little embarrassed at losing my composure, Oh! I cannot tell you how many times I say this in a day.

I work with scientists and try to help them share their ideas with non-scientists who could apply scientific results to community policies, businesses, and resource management activities. Scientists are some of the most complex speakers and writers around. A 30-to-40-word sentence is just plain status quo, as is giving formulaic presentations crammed with jargon that move from introduction to methods to results to discussion.

This overly complex communication style is completely acceptable when talking to a scientific audience, but you know what really impresses scientists when they go to conferences? New, exciting ideas!

When a new idea hits the floor, hands go up. People rush the stage to talk more with the presenter. No one rushes the stage to congratulate a presenter on the accurate use of the phrase "explanatory variables." No one buys a book by David Foster Wallace because he wrote an entire short story in one, long, multi-page sentence.

We all want quality ideas.

Would you prefer your audience completely misses the impact of your idea because it wasn't clear, or it was masked in jargon, or it was tucked away into a winding sentence?

Think about comedians. In the stand-up world, carefully worded sentences are the name of the game. A comedian tries to lead the audience through a story from set-up to punch line. When the audience gets the joke, comedians say the joke "landed," like a jet lowering itself into the audience's mind. "Landing" a joke depends on the audience's complete understanding of the entire story. If there's confusion or if the audience has to think too hard, at best, you get a delayed chuckle instead of a burst of laughter.

Is stand-up comedy really that different than giving a business presentation? In both cases, you want to inspire a strong reaction. In comedy, you want laughter. In business, you want to sell your product or convince someone to fund your idea.

At the end of the day, whether someone is a doctor, lawyer, rocket scientist, CEO, or gas station attendant, underneath they're all just men, women, and children who want to be inspired by something new, by some great idea.

Don't miss the opportunity to give your audience something to talk about and remember by trying to impress them with your intelligence.

Develop all of your communication around one goal: Impress readers and listeners with the quality of your ideas! And do it by making your ideas, not your creative command of language, shine!