Selling Yourself As a Speaker 83
Sentences such as that can be edited and reconstructed into shorter,
more dynamic, easier-to-deliver sentences. The audience might even
go away remembering the message if it was perceived this way:
“We could cut those costs. We could reduce the in-
convenience to the passengers. But we’d have to make
some changes, basic changes, in the way we fund and
manage air traffic control.”Simple language is a winner
A talk that uses simple language is easy to give; it’s easy to
follow; and it’s easy to understand. An audience that stops to think
about definitions, grammar, syntax, and vague imagery invariably
falls behind the speaker and loses the next thought.
Forget statistics. Lists of numbers belong in telephone direc-
tories. Your job is to talk in unforgettable terms: stories, anec-
dotes, examples, and figures of speech that will paint word pic-
tures for them and help them understand instantly. I call it “be-
coming your own best visual aid.” People relate to you when you’re
using these “unforgettables.”
In one of my workshops, a participant delivered this
humdinger as the training began:
“Proposals submitted by offerors in response to the
agency’s RFP HSCS-6 for an information management
system were examined by the agency evaluation team in
order to determine that 100 percent of the mandatory re-
quirements, considered paramount to the adequate func-
tion of the system to fulfill basic agency needs, had been
met; and secondly to estimate the offerors’ ability to meet
the evaluated optional features, as were set forth in the
above mentioned RFP. It was determined by the evalua-
tion team, using the stated evaluation guidelines, that XYZ
Corporation (he named the company) was not in a posi-
tion to provide the important, if not mandatory, evalu-
ated optional features.”
After training, he changed it to:
“Buying a computer system isn’t that different from
buying a car. First, you go to a few dealers and look at
their cars. Then, you check the options you want.