Economy of words

Today's Life Lessons

Economy of words
 

BUSINESS MATTERS (Beyond the bottom line) By Francis J. Kong  

(The Philippine Star) 

Updated February 25, 2012 

In promulgating your esoteric cogitation or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.

Let your conversational communications possess a compacted conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency and a concatenated consistency.

Eschew obfuscation and all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations.

Let your extemporaneous descanting and unpremeditated expatiation have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.

Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy and vain vapid verbosity.

Sounds Greek? But it’s not! With all those words, what I was trying to say was simply, “Be brief, and don’t use big words.”

As a public speaker, I have been frequently asked for tips on how to improve a speech. Let me share with you two strong ideas on public speaking that I live by:

1. Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening. Says Dorothy Sarnoff, “In other words, do not bore them to death.”

2. Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating, so make sure that you are giving out words that would benefit the audience and not yourself.

Learn to use an economy of words to deliver a profound message. Learn to use words that communicate precise meaning. This can be achieved with a vocabulary arsenal that you continuously built. The famous motivational speaker Denis Waitley says that only a mere 3,000 words separate the winners from the losers.

Consider this:

• The Pythagorean theorem: 24 words

• The Lord’s Prayer: 66 words

• Archimedes’ principle: 67 words

• The 10 Commandments: 179 words

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: 286 words

• The US Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words

• The US Government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words

I guess the lesser the words, the more meaning the message communicates.

Keep your message short, without sacrificing good content and substance of course. Do not apologize that you usually need more time to speak. Be confident that you can communicate effectively within the time allotted you.

Do not be limited to visual aids. Firing up the imagination of your audience is better than trapping them to that fancy PowerPoint slide you have laboriously prepared. Develop your ability to tell stories.

Even Jesus used stories and spoke with few words, and the lessons He taught have endured generations.

That’s how it is done. Learn from the Master Storyteller Himself.