If you are a writer or a speaker this will help you understand how words work and how to make you message stick. This talk comes from the books Presentation Zen by Garr Reynold and Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa.

Here is a recording and slides for the Ladder of Abstraction talk that I gave at the Austin Rhetoric Club a few weeks ago.

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The Ladder of Abstraction I got this blog and I set up a RSS syndication feed which means that you can subscribe to it though an RSS agrigator on your computer but I was having some trouble yesterday because I was also trying to syndicate the RSS feed from cgames.com podcast which is also a blog onto my blog so that you could see both feeds on the same page.

The problem was that the RSS feed that was on there was looking toward the wrong FTP server so the xemail link was bad. Who understood what I just said? Two people! That was exactly what I was expecting.

What I will be talking about today is something called the “curse of knowledge.”

Believe it or not knowledge is a curse or it can be. Here are a few reasons why knowledge can be such a curse. #1 It can make us proud. “Knowledge puffeth up” is what the Bible says. #2 The other thing that knowledge does to speakers is it makes it hard for us to communicate. The way that it does that is when we have knowledge it’s difficult for us to understand that other people don’t have that same knowledge. So when we speak to them we speak in terms and abstractions that make perfect sense to us but that have no meaning for our listeners.

So when I talk about an RSS agrigator only a few people know what that means. If you know what that means it opens up a whole world of meaning in your mind but if you don’t know what it means you start to fall asleep. I was looking at some of your expressions and you were like “oh, no! This guy is talking about stuff that I totally don’t understand!” I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t of understood what I just said until my blog broke yesterday and I had to fix it. I was asking Google help and then I had a friend come over and fix it. So the talk that I’m giving is based off of two books. One is “Presentation Zen” which came out recently. It is amazing! The guy is Japanese so he mentions Zen but it’s not very Buddhist despite the name. He has some really great principles on simple communication.

The other one is by another Japanese guy; “The Love Langue of Thought and Action.” That is what this talk is about in part and the Ladder of Abstraction. So most speeches are boring, right? Most speeches are boring. Why is that? What makes speeches boring? Because of the person that presents it? O.K.