Make it Clear

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Essentials of Persuasion

In this chapter, you learn principles applicable to communication whenever your purpose is to persuade your listeners and readers to think favorably of you, your idea, or your product. You may want them to hire you, honor you, find your idea interesting, make a better decision, believe your idea is the right way, or buy your product.

You have at most only a few minutes to convince people to listen to you.

It is even worse for written work: busy readers will devote not more than a few seconds to deciding whether to read about your ideas.

When speaking and writing, I use what I call the Vision–Steps–News… Contributions framework, frequently abbreviated to VSN-C. 
You start with a quick statement of your Vision; 
next you enumerate the Steps you have been taking; 
and then you supply News by describing something that just happened. 
You finish with an enumeration of your Contributions.

The Vision–Steps–News… Contributions framework is a foundation for all sorts of spoken and written communication.

Your Vision combines a problem people care about and an approach to that problem’s solution. It is necessary, but not sufficient, to care about the problem yourself. You need to be sure your audience also cares.

Tips
Express a community-specific vision. Connect your vision to what your community audience cares about

Once you have convinced everyone that you have a Vision—a problem and an approach to solving it—you need to convince everyone that you have done something about it. To be convincing, you start by exhibiting a carefully thought-out plan. Then, you demonstrate your intellectual athleticism by showing that you have made progress on at least one of the Steps in the plan. The point is to show you think about what you are doing.

Show what you have done right up front, and explain that the rest of your oral presentation or written work will show how you did it. You do this to assure your audience that you are not describing old work. Your presentation or writing is about right now, about today’s excitement, about your passion, about what will happen tomorrow and next week. Your audience will feel privileged to learn about it before everyone else.

Once you have articulated your Vision, shown your Steps, and announced News, then you enter the body of your talk where you explain what you have done in detail, guided by what you have accumulated when outlining your talk.

Similarly, you should always conclude your written work with a section titled Contributions, or a suitable synonym, that summarizes, in a memorable way, what you or your organization contributed to engineering prowess, scientific research, business acumen, military readiness, non-profit achievement, or other work.

Winston, Patrick Henry. Make it Clear (p. 11). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

Essentials for Being Remembered

Include a slogan

Ask anyone what they remember about someone’s spoken or written communication. If they remember anything, with high probability the answer will be in the form of a short, slogan-like word or phrase that serves as a kind of handle.

You should decide on a suitable slogan for your work and be sure everyone knows what that slogan is. In an oral presentation, you can emphasize your slogan by saying explicitly, “The key idea in my work—the idea I want you to remember—is the power of ⟨slogan⟩.”

Include a Symbol

Pictures, drawings, maps, graphs, and graphics can serve as symbols, as suggested by the following examples.

Include a Salient Idea

By salient idea, I mean an idea that sticks out, not just an important idea. Otherwise, people may remember you as having a lot of ideas, but that is not as good as remembering you as the owner of a particular idea. How do you signal that a particular idea is the salient idea? You say so, preferably in a few words or sentences.

Include a Surprise

We all love surprises. We tell people about them at dinner. We tell people about them again in small talk at parties. So if your work has a surprise in it somewhere, be sure to note it.

Include a Story

Throughout this book, I emphasize that we humans love stories. We want to know not only about ideas and results, but also about who developed them and how. Why did she start to work on the problem? With whom did he work? How did they interact with each other? Was it in the office at a blackboard or strolling along a beach? Did they lose sleep? How long were they stuck? Was there an epiphanous moment? Did someone have a dream? What do they think will happen next?

Essentials of Outlining

Rigidity chokes creativity. When you prepare a Harvard outline, you may find yourself wasting time worrying about whether an item should be at the Roman, capital, or Arabic level. And what if you get the urge to work on an outline while stretched out on the beach or over coffee in a cafe with no laptop in sight? What you need is what I call a broken-glass outline, my label for a visualization, similar to a mind map, that looks a bit like broken glass. You start with your title in the center, and then you draw radiating spokes for the major subdivisions. Out of those radiating spokes come more lines for the minor subdivisions.

Winston, Patrick Henry. Make it Clear (p. 30). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

How To start
Explain why you are glad to be there. 
Explain your Vision: identify the problem and announce your approach. 
Express your Vision as an if-then statement or in one of several standard forms. 
Explain your Steps, demonstrating that you have a plan. Thrill with News, making everything you talk about current.

Do not thank your audience to conclude your talks; instead, end with a reference to your Contributions, a joke, a story, or a salute.

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