Write Well. Speak Well. Five Writing Tips To Streamline Your Meetings.
Speaking on the fly gets tough, especially for the shy, introverted, and/or the overwhelmed when meetings yield minimal mental real estate to think. But there’s a cost here. From the frontlines, I hear many leaders wondering: How do I avoid fading out? How do I close the loop on something I began and feel less lost. We’re talking real-world concerns here where astute, well-educated professionals feel overloaded, disoriented, and incoherent. With that, I hear of dread and regret around meetings vs. joy — even excitement.
One possible antidote ties to applying writing techniques we writers use for flow, clarity, and effective paragraph structure when we share our big ideas. Interestingly, we see excellent results. These structures, which I learned at journalism school and from editors all over the globe, work beautifully for oral communicators, too. Want to learn and play?
State Your Topic Sentence
Start your idea with a topic sentence to frame things. Some small rules help including capping your idea at 20 words or so and ensuring you alert your listeners of the overarching topic that follows. In oral communications, you might also want to offer the idea and request short feedback before you proceed. E.G. I’ve a potentially clever/new/ambitious way to solve for X. Want to hear? Whatever it is, state your overarching idea first.
Add Supporting Ideas to Develop the Main Idea
Now you’ve committed to your topic, flesh out whatever you promised with your topic sentence. (If you know already the exact number of offerings, you could go back to that topic sentence, then share I’ve three potentially clever ways to solve for X.) If you don’t know the exact number, that’s ok; just share them. Tips for organizing the ideas may include:
- Number them if you’ve a list. First idea… Second idea… and the third idea…, etc.
- Provide adequate support aligned to your topic sentence. Online Writing Lab Purdue suggests drawing from anecdotes, data, testimonial, examples, and/or quotes and paraphrases. Whatever you use, offer substance.
- Keep the descriptions of each idea as succinct as possible and stay aligned only with that one topic with each sharing. Think of a paragraph in a news feature. You’ve room for a sentence or two for each supporting concept. Cherry pick the most pertinent details and know your audience can ask for more insight and depth after. Less equals more.
Add a ‘So What’ Sentence To Tie Things Together At the End
The deceptively tricky part to sharing ideas becomes the ‘so what’ sentence at the end. This concluding sentence can summarize, bring things forward, and signal a transition. Without this statement, you’ll not have closed the loop nor signal to your audience you’re complete. To avoid a fade out to your big idea, summarize what you just shared and then consider:
- Reminding us why this input matters — what’s at stake here?
- Reminding us how this sharing differs to what else you’ve heard. E.G. We’ve tried A, B, and C to no avail. D, because it’s so new, holds merit, especially now.
- Offering some small vulnerability on why this matters to you personally. E.G. I know X, Y, and Z sounds unconventional; but given the climate, it’s time to think big. What do you think?
Apply Transitions To Smoothly Retain Your Audience
A favorite writing technique I learned from high school English in Christchurch, New Zealand still serves me as a communicator today: Transition ideas in smooth vs. choppy ways to retain your audience.
My English and media studies teacher, David Tapp, offered a delightful metaphor of Olympian runners to drive home this rule. He mused that if an Olympian runner hands the flaming torch to the next runner in a clunky way, we see the torch drop, a maddened crowd, and the magic lost. Consider these tips for a smooth handoff of your ideas:
- Braid in similar or related language as you transition from one idea to the next.
- Play with rhetorical questions. E.G. If one idea ends with noticing low team morale, the next idea might become: “So how do we boost that lost but vital morale?”
- Move the conversation forward with acknowledging what you or others shared and exploring logically what’s next. Using that same earlier example, if the conversation steers to boosting morale, a new insight might tie to potential barriers or obstacles. With that, a transition could become: “With the strategy in place, what barriers might we encounter — and how might we circumnavigate them?”
Use Plain vs. Complicated Language
My final writing tip today for oral communicators: Never use a complicated word when a simple word will do. [And I take this rule from my well-used the Economist Style Guide, which I highly recommend!] Here’s the idea: When we rely on flowery or verbose writing, we lose our readers and take up too much space. (Journalists who ignore skinny word count requests and submit bloated copy to their editors torpedo their career.) We also risk, in business writing, sounding bureaucratic, stuffy, lofty — or very old fashioned because our words establish a tone.
The same impact occurs in business speaking. When you keep your language plain and accessible, you sound more approachable, lighter, more comfortable in your skin. You become more nimble, too, because you’re speaking just like you might to a trusted and familiar audience. And that’s not to discourage using plain language playfully. You can. But resist this idea that a perfect or fancy word reveals perfect, fancy ideas. Not true.
There you have five tried-and-tested writing techniques to plug in to your next team communications. Perhaps some of these techniques sound familiar from high school, and if so, great! Revive and reuse in your meetings. If not, have fun applying these small structural techniques to your next big idea. We’d love to hear what shift you feel — and how things landed, too.
Debbi coaches and trains immigrant leaders to become more confident and authentic communicators, and with that, more concise, too. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communication effectiveness fellow coach to leaders all over the globe with BetterUp.