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Shorter sentences

Course video 39 of 47

This week is about language you speak or write slides with. Concrete vs abstract words. Common everyday words vs jargon. Active voice vs passive voice. Short sentences vs long sentences. One mistake often made — to speak as you write. Such approach leads to vague, long and unclear messages. We are going to fix this.

Presentation skills: Speechwriting and Storytelling

National Research Tomsk State University

Course 1 of 4 in the Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery Specialization

“99% presentations suck!”, — said Apple former evangelist Guy Kawasaki in 2005. Up to now the situation hasn’t improved yet. Why? Most public speaking courses focus on “how” instead of “what & why”. How to stand, walk and talk during delivery with little attention paid to “what” — the quality of storytelling itself. Thereby a usual result is a looking slightly confident speaker with mesmerizing voice delivering an obscure mess of facts, figures and claims. In this course we take a more systematic approach, focusing on the content. How to structure your ideas, facts and data into a logical convincing story using a narrative structure. This course covers fundamentals of scriptwriting, packing, argumentation and language. This course is not about how to fabricate a catching tale, but rather how to structure your ideas, facts and data into an interesting story you are going to tell during your presentation.

Taught By

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Transcript

Short sentences.

When we speak, we try to use shorter sentences.

Just one subject in each sentence.

This is a huge problem for me, and my sentences go way over the head.

And try to use 12 to 15 words per sentence, or even fewer.

Steve Jobs managed to cut it down to ten, so there.

Way to go.

This is a very typical piece of academic writing.

We propose that people may gain certain offensive and defensive advantages for

their cherished belief systems, etc., etc.

Very hard to read.

Very hard to listen to.

And, of course, these are three separate sentences, or at least they should be.

And it is just way more easy to understand this way.

We propose that people may gain certain advantages.

They could do it by including aspects of unfalsifiability or very dangerous work.

This means that much easier to understand.

It is okay to repeat yourself.

I know when we're writing, we're trying to remove

words which we think are redundant, and well, this is how we write.

So it's a really cool box, which was designed for wide-screen TVs,

and works with video, music and photos, you go, Wi-Fi networking and

internal 40 gig hard drive, just one long sentence list.

But when we speak, we say it differently.

We say, so it's a really cool box, full stop.

It works with videos, music and photos, full stop.

It was designed for wide-screen TVs,

you got Wi-Fi networking internal 40 gig hard drive.

This way it is much easier to say and is much easier to listen.

We don't want to make another one of these, we want to make something,

we want to make something, we want to bring.

You have to repeat yourself.

This is how spoken text works.

And I know some people might say, this is cold.

Anaphora, this is a rhetorical device.

Like in Martin Luther Kings famous speech, I have a dream, I have a dream,

I have a dream, I have a dream.

But I don't think so.

I think that this is just how natural speech sounds,

this is how we speak in our everyday conversations.

This is us trying to be understood by the audience.

Breaking stuff into small chunks, small pieces of information,

so not anaphora, this is not us trying to make our speech prettier.

This is us trying to be clearer, easier to understand.

And be aware that in presentations we frequently use lists which are great.

I know that at the moment, lists get a bad reputation.

This list is probably way longer than it should be, but this has to do with,

of course, advances in cognitive science.

Well, they used to say that seven plus minus two is the limit.

And this list has like seven items, way too long.

They went back and reconsidered.

And I understand that current scientific consensus is somewhere around four plus

minus one so try not to make your lists longer than five items, make them short.

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