Simple Communication

How do you even start building a presentation. Where do you begin. What steps do you take to do it well. People fantasize that great decks just burst into existence like Athena from Zeus’ skull. They don’t. They are engineered.

The most common crime in the world of slides is what I call chaos mode. The author always denies it. They call it “spontaneous”. Spontaneous sounds like jazz. Chaos sounds like a toddler with a chainsaw. The effect in presentations is roughly the same. Spontaneity in decks breeds chaos. The good ones you remember are never improvised. They are the product of a process. The tighter your process, the tighter your talk. So what is the process. Let’s start at the beginning.

Triple enumerations are a powerful tool of persuasion in rhetoric. For some reason, triple arguments have a pleasing rhythm, they are convincing, and they work better than single or double arguments. The number three shows up everywhere—in titles, sayings, and rhetoric.

Liberty, equality, fraternity
Veni, vidi, vici
The Holy Trinity
The Three Little Pigs
The Three Musketeers
The three circles of hell
And so on.

What is it about the number three that gives it such persuasive power? How can we use it? How do we build arguments in triples?

“Nonverbal communication makes up as much as 93% of all communication” – this claim is the biggest distortion repeated in books, press articles, and communication training. Where did it come from? What is the truth?

Many people believed the claim that 93% of all communication is nonverbal. And this claim keeps getting passed on.

Where did this distortion come from?

To understand the real meaning and context of Mehrabian’s study, we need to go back to the 1960s. Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at UCLA, conducted a series of studies on nonverbal communication. His research focused on how people interpret conflicting messages – situations in which the verbal content contradicted the tone of voice or facial expression.
 

Simple communication. What is it? Can it be defined—so that we could list criteria and check whether the way we speak, write, or present is simple, understandable, and effective? I searched for such a good definition but found none anywhere. In the end I created my own. Here it is: SIMPLE communication formula to implement in any business.