Throughout these blogs, we have been asking the question: What causes people to be successful in their careers? The answer we provided was the achievement of people skills. We showed evidence of this position through research from leading universities. This research showed that much more than half of job success comes from people skills. We also noted that much of what we call people skills is effective communication.

Communication as a Premier People Skill

In our first blog, we used the model developed by Robert Bolton in People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts to show that certain attitudes support a person’s successful efforts at effective communication, attitudes that produce good relationships before formal communication even starts. These attitudes are genuineness, respect, and empathy.[1] We will refer to this paradigm as the “Bolton Model.”  

The following is a visualization of Bolton’s model:

In efforts to apply these qualities, they appear as a blend, an overlapping; the way we participate in society, in our family, in our social network, and in our workplace, however, all depend on applying these characteristics.

In efforts to apply these qualities, they appear as a blend, an overlapping: the way we participate in society, in our family, in our social network, and in our workplace.

To make clear the meaning of these words, we cite some approximate equivalents:

Our Term	Approximate Equivalents
Genuineness	Authenticity, Transparency, Openness
Respect	Caring, Agape Love
Empathy	Understanding, Feeling With

In the second blog, Part II, we examined the art of listening as a starting point for our examination of effective communication, with a regular circling back to those three essential attitudes of genuineness, respect, and empathy which support the person’s credibility with an audience of one or one hundred. Listening represents a learnable skill supporting the three attitudes.

In our third blog, Part III, we examined the challenge of effective speech making through a variety of topics developed from the personal experiences of the writer and from reliable sources, including Aristotle from his On Rhetoric.

We now turn to the subject of the fourth blog: word choice, style, and language sophistication, which, taken as a whole, covers the subject of writing the speech. Many of us were taught in speech courses to prepare a detailed outline with information supporting our main topics and speak extemporaneously. This approach was said to be the most natural, causing us to link with our audience more effectively. This model may be useful for certain speech situations, but if a person has to prepare for an important speech, which goes to the reputation of the speaker, it’s always best to write out the speech word for word. I’m not recommending reading the speech, for this is the most difficult approach to speech making. But, if one writes out a speech and then practices extensively from the written speech, the words come fluently when one actually delivers the speech from an outline. It can be lively and direct.

Choice of Words

Words are vital to our own thinking process. Until we can express a thought in words, it is useless to us. Getting the right words is equivalent to “Hey, I have a really great idea.”

Being an excellent communicator means that we can convert our ideas into communication symbol systems, words, spoken or written, body language and facial expressions, speech delivery, all supporting our verbal processes. Not only do experts believe this, based on social science research, but we know it based on our own introspection. We know that to communicate effectively, accurately, and clearly, we have to be able to manipulate words as symbols.

As with so much of human communication, the cognitive base for word selection and word processing into larger chunks such as phrases, clauses, and sentences represents a vast reservoir of conscious and subconscious ideas. So, to uncover some of the widely acknowledged truths about speech writing, we turn to the subjects of word choice, style, and language sophistication.

Word Choice

Create Mood with Language

In our earlier blog, we pointed out that word choice determined the overall mood of a communication, along with other symbol systems such as body language, facial expressions, and voice. Two dimensions of language that greatly influence mood are positive vs. negative language and formal vs. informal language[2]:

POSITIVE VS. NEGATIVE TONE

Negative	The office will close at 7 p.m.
Positive	The office will remain open until 7 p.m.
Negative	The plan is not practicable.
Positive	The plan has major stumbling blocks.

FORMAL VS. INFORMAL TONE

Formal	Informal
few or no contractions	contractions
few or no first-person pronouns	first-person pronouns
few or no colloquial expressions	colloquial expressions
complex or technical vocabulary	simple, non-technical vocabulary
longer sentences	shorter sentences
passive voice	active voice
precise figures	approximate figures
introduction and conclusion	no introduction or conclusion
salutations and signatures	no salutations or signatures
table of contents	no table of contents
bibliography or footnotes	no bibliography or footnotes

Eliminate Clutter

Our speech is often filled with clutter that creates an adverse effect on our speech efforts in a number of ways:

• Clutter words increase the number of words per sentence, making audience attention more difficult.
• Clutter words are often empty words, husks containing no verbal information, making it easier for the audience to tune out.
• Clutter words can cause the speaker to sound shifty: What’s the speaker trying to hide?

Some examples follow[3]:

Clutter

vs.

Effective

along the line of	similar to, like
due to the fact that	because of
in case	if
in favor of	for
in reference to	re, referencing, about
in terms of	in
in the event of	if, when
in the majority of instances	most often, usually
in the neighborhood of	near, approximately
in the time of	during
in view of the above	thus, therefore, since, hence
on a few occasions	sometimes, occasionally
on the ground that	based on, because, since
prior to	before
with a view to	looking to, to
with the exception of	excepting, except for

Reduce Elegant Language

Do you want to sound stuffy, pompous, and arrogant — and just a little ridiculous besides? Just use elegant language throughout your speech. Sometimes one might use one of those Latinized words for variety or specific meaning. Too much is all frosting and no cake. Avoiding elegant language will improve your ethos, your credibility. Examples of the ineffective (elegant language) and effective (down home, believable) follow[4]:

	Ineffective	vs.	Effective
	assistance		help
	compensation		pay
	configuration		form
nouns	discrepancy		difference, variance
	encounter		meeting
	modification		change
	objective		goal, aim
	obligation		duty, debt
	ascertain		determine, learn
	contribute		give
	consolidate		combine
	construct		make, build
	demonstrate		show
	encounter		meet
verbs	endeavor		try
	incorporate		include
	initiate		begin, start
	proceed		go
	reimburse		repay
	substantiate		prove
	transmit		send
	utilize		use
	approximately		about
adjectives/	equivalent		same, equal
adverbs	initial		first
	optimum		best
	presently		now

Use Transitions Liberally

A well-written speech consists of a number of paragraphs supporting a main element of the speech. For understanding, the audience requires transition words as signals that the amplification of a main topic is changing direction. Some examples follow[5]:

The transition may establish contrast:

however            although            conversely

but                        nevertheless            on the other hand

The transition may establish comparison:

similarly            likewise

The transition may establish example:

for example            for instance            specifically

The transition may establish addition:

also            besides

in addition

The transition may establish result:

as a result            therefore            consequently            so

The transition may establish time:

now                        meanwhile            later                        after

The transition may establish sequence:

first                        second                        third

then                        next                        finally

Streamline Prepositional Phrases

A preposition is a word that combines with a noun or pronoun and shows a relationship with another sentence element.

PREPOSITIONS

direction:           to, into, across, toward
location:            at, in, on, over, under, beside, by, among, through, between
time:                    before, after, during, until, since
position:            for, against, with, without, of

Prepositions often cause wordiness. You can often eliminate the wordiness by inverting the phrase. Sometimes you need to change the word to reflect the new construction.[6]

Examples	Change	“Director of Marketing”
	To	“Marketing Director.”
	Change	“He is without hope.”
	To	“He is hopeless.”
	Change	“luggage without identification”
	To	“unidentified luggage”
	Change	“the meeting on Monday”
	To	“Monday’s meeting”

Avoid Buzzwords

Technically speaking, buzzwords are not jargon. Jargon generally represents the technical terminology of a particular profession or line of work, such as legalese. One should avoid using jargon except with those who use the same jargon. But buzzwords, clearly related to jargon but not the same, for most experienced writers and speakers are a difficult sort of barrier to meaning. Buzzwords are the argot of a particular organization that the writer or speaker is immersed in. Some frequently used buzzwords and their meanings include:

strategic alliance:            informal partnership

downsized:                        fired

paradigm:                        a pattern that is used to get things done

Just as with jargon, such language can be appropriate for a specific audience, but for the general audience — no. One can object to this kind of language for the general audience on the grounds that such language is usually vague and those who use it don’t really know what it means in specific circumstances.

Use Positive Words

Words used to communicate, to deliver speeches, that convey negativity are processed by the brain differently than positive words. Neuroscience has shown that the message the rational brain ultimately receives — and it receives the message more slowly with negative words than positive words — is that the speaker who uses a lot of negative words is destined to be a failure. On the other hand, when a speaker uses positive words, enthusiasm, confidence, and “can do,” these are all processed positively by the listener’s brain. Following are two lists, one titled “Avoid These Words” and the other titled “Use These Words,” that can help the speech writer use the force of positive words in a speech script[7]:

Avoid These Words	Use These Words
can’t	can
won’t	will
shouldn’t	may
wouldn’t	eager
must not	hopeful
should not	confident
fail	solve
afraid	resolve
unavoidable	manage
uncontrollable	feasible
impossible	succeed
overwhelming	accomplish
hopeless	productive
incapable	achieve
problem	alternatives
crisis	innovative
catastrophe	plan
	opportunity
	challenge
	potential

The words on the left-hand column convey the message of failure, while the words in the right-hand column convey optimism.

In addition, differences in effectiveness exist between words that reflect “partnership” and words that reflect divisiveness. Following are two columns, the one presenting divisive words and the other presenting positive words[8]:

Divisive Words	Positive Words
I	we
me	our
mine	team
my	together
control	help
blame	guide
fault	cooperate
insist	confer
	collaborate
	build
	coordinate
	care
	loyal
	united
	consult

The writers Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., and Mark Mazzarella indicate in their book Put Your Best Foot Forward that they have sat in on hundreds of meetings between lawyers and clients, and they see some lawyers who focus on “problem” issues and others who focus on joint efforts to overcome obstacles. They conclude, “Those who project a solution and team-centered approach invariably instill confidence and trust.”[9]

Avoid Gender Speech Communication

The message has been out for a long time that many individuals and many women’s groups believe that language should be inclusive. Following are some examples that illuminate this point[10]:

Avoid	Use
Each person will be pleased if he receives a present.	Each person will be pleased if he or she receives a present.
When everyone selects his present, we’ll start the music.	When all the students select their presents, we’ll start the music.

A speaker should not open up his or her speech situation to embarrassing questions and criticisms concerning sexist language.

Style

Style has many meanings among academics who study and teach the subject in departments of literature, rhetoric, communication, linguistics, law, business, and others. No one owns “style.” For our purposes, and favoring the KISS principle, we will say simply that style is the way something is said or written. Style covers word choice, but style is so much more than word choice. It covers all the ways words can be put together to achieve the speaker’s purpose. The subject is so vast that we can cover it only in outline.

How Prose for Speaking Varies from Prose for Writing

Following are twenty-five ways spoken effective prose and written effective prose vary. Effective oral prose incorporates[11]:

1. more personal pronouns
2. more variety in kinds of sentences
3. more variety in sentence lengths
4. more simple sentences
5. more sentence fragments
6. many more rhetorical questions
7. more repetition of words, phrases, and sentences
8. more monosyllabic words
9. more contractions
10. more interjections
11. more stories and anecdotes
12. more connotative than denotative words
13. more euphony
14. more figurative language
15. more direct quotation
16. more familiar words
17. more active voice than passive voice
18. more clear transitions
19. more concrete language than abstract
20. more informal language
21. more personal language: “I,” “you,” “we”
22. less jargon (definite terms of art)
23. more words rather than less to explain a topic
24. fewer points (remember the “rule of three” from Blog III)
25. and, of course, body language, gestures, facial expressions, and voice

Let me end this section with a nod to three approaches I particularly like for speech giving.

Parallelism

People in an audience (and readers as well) get the message more easily if elements are presented in parallel form:

No:	His speeches are timely and he speaks with vigor.
Yes:	His speeches are timely and delivered vigorously.

Using parallel structure for lists, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs causes audiences and readers to think and feel that the message sender is a polished speaker/writer.

Favor Active Voice

Active voice is superior to passive voice for a variety of reasons:

• Active voice usually requires fewer words.
• Often the doer of an action is not mentioned in passive voice.
• Passive voice reverses the normal subject-verb-object sentence order.

Some examples are[12]:

Passive	The problem was discovered yesterday.
Active	Our intern discovered the problem yesterday.
Passive	The writing of the report was easy.
Active	She wrote the report easily.

Sometimes, however, the passive is preferred if the doer is to be hidden or for variety.

Avoid Long Sentences

Long sentences violate Aristotle’s most fundamental rule of style: clarity. This point is extensively developed in On Rhetoric. An example of the clarifying power of shorter sentences follows[13]:

ORIGINAL

Leadership—whether on the battlefield or in another area, such as politics or business—can take place either by example or command, and Alexander the Great, renowned in both history and legend, is a good example of a military leader who led by both command and personal example, whereas Gandhi and Mother Teresa, both famous for their devotion to great causes, provide instances of people leading primarily by the power of inspiring personal example.

BETTER

Leadership can take place either by example or command. Alexander the Great is an example of a military leader who did both. Gandhi and Mother Teresa, on the other hand, led primarily by the power of inspiring personal example.

We can see, then, how cutting long sentences and working on brevity makes a discourse more listener-friendly.

Language Sophistication

Certainly, having command of all of the style tools we just covered can be said to be language sophistication. But my meaning here goes beyond command of language tools; here I am taking the subject to the area of deep meaning: it would include connotation and other topics about what represents meaning subconsciously.

The Difference Between Denotative and Connotative Meaning

This device allows the speaker or writer to influence without being noticed. Denotative meaning is what dictionaries tell us that a word means. Connotative meaning concerns the associations, conceptual, visual, and emotional, that all of us carry around in our heads concerning a certain word or words. When we compose a speech, we should always think about the words we are using, both the literal meaning and the suggestive meaning. Here are a few examples:[xiv]

Denotative Words	Connotative Words
untidy	slovenly
romance	love affair
slim	svelte
angry	livid
overweight	obese
unattractive	ugly
attractive	gorgeous
hungry	famished
tired	exhausted

What Do We Mean by Meaning?

I wish to explore just one other idea about deep language: “What you say is what you personally think.” This line of thinking started with Alfred Korzybski, who wrote, in 1933, Science and Sanity. The movement he started is called general semantics, and, in its simplest terms, he posited these theories:

• Meanings are not in words but in people.
• No two brains contain exactly the same meaning for any word, expression, or concept.
• Therefore, there can be no universal meaning of any verbal map.
• Language both expresses our thoughts and creates our thoughts.
• Language both expresses community and creates community.
• We are such efficient users of our language that we’re seldom conscious that our verbal maps only represent reality.
• One of Korzybski’s sayings often repeated by his followers is “The map is not the territory.”

For anyone interested in learning a lot about the use and misuse of language in our current environment, I strongly recommend Practical Intelligence by Karl Albrecht. Albrecht lays out for us seven semantic sins[15]:

1. Blanketing—declaring one’s opinions, beliefs, or judgments as if they were true for everybody
2. Aggression—belittling a person by describing him or her in demeaning, critical, judgmental, accusative, or sarcastic language
3. Directiveness—pressuring a person indirectly with “should” language
4. Attribution—attaching a motivation, often an ignoble one, to a person’s behavior
5. All-ness—generalizing so broadly as to obscure important differences
6. Dogmatism—a strong, unconditional, declarative statement or value judgment
7. Polarization—framing an issue, problem, or disagreement in terms of only two mutually exclusive possibilities

These descriptions are only partial statements concerning this topic of what do we mean by meaning, and again I recommend Practical Intelligence. To anyone interested in the sane use of language and developing mind skills that cause us to be far better at making better decisions, understanding our options, embracing ambiguity and complexity, articulating problems clearly and working to solutions, having original ideas, and influencing the ideas of others, this book covers it all.[16]

Adios

I enjoyed speaking with you all through this blog. I have tried to communicate (get the little joke?) about the great importance of human communication ideas and skills for life success. We need to think with attitudes of genuineness, respect, and empathy and communicate these attitudes (the Bolton Model). We need to listen actively and effectively, and we need to speak using all the rhetorical tools accumulated for over 2,000 years from Aristotle to Karl Albrecht. I hope I have not kept you for too long. Brevity is a marvelous principle of effective communication. Also, pardon me for lapses that do not conform to the ideas I presented. (How about the trees and the woods cliché in Blog II?) I am sorry that I had to leave out many important aspects of public speaking — voice, delivery, body and facial language, use of statistics and other ways to amplify, story telling as an important means of persuasion, eye contact, and using specific, definite, and concrete language.

Concerning the last item, before I leave you, let me mention one little book, just about 100 pages, that has been described this way by one critic: “No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer (or speaker) more than this persistent little volume.”  The book is Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, now in the 4th edition. If you want to review quickly how to communicate correctly and with style, get this book for your library. Its focus is writing, but great speeches start as written documents. Many ideas covered by the writer in Blogs III and IV are amplified in this hugely popular work, selling millions of copies. I leave you with some words from Strunk and White that, while they are talking about writing, apply here[17]:

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the interest of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

To achieve excellence in oral communication, then, yes, be specific, definite, and concrete — all about choosing the right word, but also recognize the ways that effective oral communication varies from written, and don’t forget those attitudes: genuineness, respect, and empathy.  Your audience will recognize these attitudes and reward you with attention and agreement.

Copyright: Claude L. Kordus, 2010. All rights reserved.

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[1] Robert Bolton, Ph.D., People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986) 259.

[2] Brandon Royal, The Little Red Writing Book (New York: Metro Books, 2009) 82-84.

[3] Hewitt Associates Internal Training Materials.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., and Mark Mazzarella, Put Your Best Foot Forward: Make a Great Impression by Taking Control of How Others See You (New York: Scribner, 2000) 246.

[8] Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., and Mark Mazzarella, 246.

[9] Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., and Mark Mazzarella, 247.

[10] Judith A. McManus, How to Write and Deliver an Effective Speech (Lawrenceville, New Jersey: ARCO, c. 1998) 65.

[11] John F. Wilson, Carroll C. Arnold, and Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Public Speaking as a Liberal Art, sixth edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990) 290.

[12] Brandon Royal, 65.

[13] Brandon Royal, 56.

[14] Judith A. McManus, 61.

[15] Karl Albrecht, Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007) 178-179.

[16] Karl Albrecht, 161-187.

[17] William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, fourth edition (New York: Longman Publishers, 1999) 21.