Too Much Information
In my teens I had a piano teacher who loved to talk. She would illustrate points in her teaching with long anecdotes about people she knew but I had never heard of. Sometimes the people in her stories were socially prominent or highly placed in the musical field. It mattered to her to mention details about them, and I suspect she derived a sense of importance by proxy when dropping their names. What she didn’t realize was that I didn’t need all that detail in order to get the point of the story. In most cases, I didn’t even need to know the people’s names. I endured those stories rather than learned from them.
What my teacher didn’t realize is that effective speaking is about the listener, not the speaker. Too much information overwhelms the listener’s brain and weakens the impact of your message.
Whether you are designing the overall structure of your talk or considering a story within it, there is always an objective. The reason for speaking is to meet your listeners where they are and take them on a journey to somewhere else. Your guiding question always is, “What do they need to know in order to get there?” You don’t want them to get lost in a forest of details along the way.
Start with a clear understanding of the main idea, the premise, of your talk. Can you state it in one sentence? For example, I love keeping chickens and I occasionally speak to groups about it. My premise is, “Keeping chickens is easy, fun and rewards you with delicious eggs.” Everything I say relates directly to that premise. Since I am taking my audience on a journey in thought, speaking off-topic would lead them away from the end point of that journey.
What do you want your audience to think about your topic when you’re finished? Edit out anything that doesn’t help to lead them there. The origin and evolution of your ideas may be very interesting to you, but does your audience need to know about them? Will that information help them develop the opinion you want them to have? Your listeners’ first priority always is, “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) They are interested in how your ideas will benefit them, not how you arrived at offering them. Craft your message to fit their need, not yours.
You may know so much about your topic that you could talk for hours. Resist the temptation to tell your audience everything you know. I heard of a study showing that the more points a speaker made, the fewer the audience remembered. When the speaker made ten points, the audience remembered none of them. The speaker might as well not have spoken! Our brains remember best in threes, so if you make three main points and support them with no more than three sub-points or stories, you stand a good chance of your information being remembered. It’s better to leave your audience wanting more than to have them wish you’d stop talking.
Vivid, detailed descriptions can be fun to read in a book. In a spoken presentation, details dilute. Stick to the broad strokes. When I first tried out my chicken talk with a group of friends, I got caught up in measurement details of the coop and roost. The comment from my audience? Put that information in a handout. For a graph on a slide, use round numbers. Sacrifice accuracy for ease of understanding; put the accurate, detailed graphs in your handout. When telling a story, leave out details that don’t directly serve the point of the story. Your audience doesn’t need to know when you last saw the characters and what you all had for lunch.
A talk is about taking the audience on an emotional journey. Too much information turns it into an intellectual one – and probably a boring one – which is far less likely to make a connection and be remembered. Give your listeners only what information will lead them to your desired journey’s end.
