Connect with your audience

For you to be understood, you need to know who is doing the understanding, and what they know so far.

Problem

• People do not understand what you’re saying.

• You have difficulty expressing yourself.

Recommendation

• Audience-oriented - Before selecting words and phrases that you want to use, familiarize yourself with the language that your audience already uses.

• Broaden your vocabulary - Build up your set of options in expressing yourself by reading a lot- whether reading books, exposing yourself to great thinkers and speakers, and researching new words that you don’t understand. This helps you understand differences in terminologies.

• Simplicity - Use simple language that is easy to understand.

Effective Use

• Attention-efficient - Your audience doesn’t get bored and is able to receive the important signal that you wanted to communicate.

• Concise - The signal to noise ratio of your communication is high - i.e. there’s very little unnecessary words used.

• Complete - You don’t miss out any important details.

• Correct and confident - You are communicating what you know to be true, and when you don’t feel confident that things you know is true, you communicate your confidence levels.

Misuse

• Self-oriented - You forcefully choose to use language that suits you or what is comfortable to yourself rather than the language that works for other people.

• Excessive and boring - People get bored or tune out when you start speaking. People struggle to or choose not to pay attention to you.

• Incomplete - People struggle to understand what you’re saying because you don’t say all of the things you need to communicate.

• Incorrect, or vague - You say things which are wrong, and when you feel doubtful or not confident about what you know, you don’t tell others about your uncertainty. This frustrates the people you try to talk to.

Examples

• TBD.