In my quest to become a better communicator, I’ve been practicing being more crisp. I was inspired by an excellent talk on crispness by Kellogg prof Craig Wortmann. As someone who’s never been accused of being overly concise, I found Wortmann’s ideas to be useful in changing my mindset. I’ll share my notes from his talk and my thoughts below:
Crispness = communicating in a clear, concise, tight, and concrete way.
When speaking crisply, you provide enough detail to inform and arouse interest, but not so much as to overwhelm. By striking this balance, you reduce ambiguity and confusion, bringing clarity instead. This clarity energizes the conversation, inviting responses and starting a conversation. That clarity and the energy you bring makes you memorable.
3 ideas to help you communicate more crisply:
- Don’t Overshare Your Knowledge: To communicate well, we have to overcome “the curse of knowledge.” The confusion caused by us oversharing our knowledge is made worse by the fact that everyone is already overwhelmed with facts and figures.
- Crispness Results from the Discipline to Distill: Discipline = Choice. Crispness results from making good choices about what knowledge to share and what to leave off.
- The main discipline: distill, distill, distill!
- This witty quote from Mark Twain illustrates the discipline involved: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
- Develop Your Skills with Crispness: Crispness, like all skills, can be developed through sustained effort and continuous feedback.
Though I only heard Wortmann’s talk a few weeks ago, I’ve found that being crisp has already improved both my conversations and writing.
Previously, in conversations I wanted to share everything I knew. By trying to do so, I ended up speaking in monologues, which killed the conversation’s flow.
I’ve come to accept that conversations aren’t a venue for me to share my complete understanding of a topic. Good conversations work because of the back-and-forth between interlocutors. By speaking crisply, I share enough to contribute a point, then stop. By stopping myself, I invite interest and questions. And I give the other person a chance to teach me by sharing their ideas. I expore the idea of our ever-changing roles as teacher and student in another essay.
Practicing the discipline to distill has been hard but worthwhile. I’m only beginning my journey, but I’ve felt encouraged by the results thus far. By forcing myself to say only the minimum necessary to make my point, I feel my communication skills improving.