The Five Bs

For Public Speaking and Beyond

Welcome to the part of the year in which no new thing may begin. I’m mostly referring to the workplace; right before Thanksgiving people start turning down meeting requests and new project launches because “oh the year is basically over, it’s Thanksgiving next week and then next thing you know it’s Christmas, let’s plan on meeting in January.” Sir, there are several perfectly good weeks between the bird holiday and the tree holiday. But you know what, it’s fine. Joke’s on you. I didn’t want to do stuff anyway.

Many cultures earlier than ours had discrepancies in their calendar somewhere, such that there were a few “leftover” weeks or days at the end of the year. In modern times I guess we handle this with leap year, which is way worse and less fun solution than “let’s party for a few days while the gods can’t see us.” The work weeks between Thanksgiving and xmas are like that for me, but with my boss instead of the gods.

Shelf Life never takes a break, though. I need it to keep my skills honed so that when I sit down and write something other than Shelf Life I can do it expediently. I used to write much slower than I do now. Every skill improves with constant use. In my case it is improving in terms of output volume, not output quality, but I’ll take it.

In any case, this is the part of the year where nothing important happens and the gods don’t see us so it’s a great time to write on some of my favorite topics that don’t always fit in elsewhere. One of those is what you have here, The Five Bs. These are something I give a talk on sometimes for earlier-career folks than myself who are interested in learning to five effective talks or presentations. These five Bs are invaluable for public speaking, email correspondence, and even—believe it or not—writing, both fiction and non. Those five Bs are:

Be brief, bro. Be brief.

Haha, get it? There’s only one B. 

I talked about brevity and over-writing in fiction once upon a time, and it’s a topic that is never far from my mind. Friends, it’s me: I’m the over-writer. And over-thinker, while I’m at it. And certainly the over-explainer. As someone who works most effectively when I understand all the ancillary information surrounding my task, it’s my habit to give others too much information when I speak to them or write to them. I believe most people can do a thing more effectively when they understand why they are doing it and what the thing is for than when they don’t. 

That said, a lot of communicating information about how to do something, or how to be good at something, does not require that level of rich detail and background. For instance: I recently produced a cookbook of contributions from ordinary folks who are not writers or authors and especially not cookbook writers. Having edited and produced cookbooks professionally in the past, I understand the creation process very well. 

I could have sent instructions to help contributors understand how each piece of information we were asking them to provide would be used, which may have informed the way they answered. We may have gotten more descriptive or more useful answers. The other side of that coin, though, is that these contributors will never again need to have information on how a cookbook is put together. That information is of no interest to them. Trying to provide more information than was strictly necessary to get a complete (or nearly complete) submission from each contributor would have certainly made the task too time-consuming for some, and would have resulted in fewer submissions overall.

That’s to illustrate why it’s often better to be brief than comprehensive, as long as you do not compromise clarity. I can’t give you a mathematical formula but I can say the more detail you put in, and the more verbiage you throw at a reader or listener, the more readers or listeners will give up and stop reading or listening. This goes for communication writing, public speaking, and expository writing for sure. It has applications for manuscript writing also but that’s not the main focus today.

When you’re speaking to a group, each individual member of the group has less ability to absorb the information you are imparting than if you gave the same speech to each member one by one. This is because:

• The individuals have less (or no) opportunity to stop your speech to ask clarifying questions or ask you to repeat something.

• One on one, you can see when the person you are speaking to is losing interest or feeling confused, which lets you adjust on the fly. Speaking to a group makes this considerably harder or impossible.

• You need to customize the depth and breadth of your coverage of the topic to an average of the group’s interest in it and ability to retain it, instead of customizing to each individual.

Given that each listener will absorb less from your speech than if you were giving a speech on the same topic to an individual, your best bet is to be as brief and concise as possible so that each listener’s absorption is maximized.

It’s the same when you communicate in writing to a large group of people (leaving out fiction writing for mass consumption, for the moment). When you’re sending an email out to a group of people, for instance, or using your technical writing skills to document a procedure. Some of your readers will read every word carefully. Some of your readers will read the first paragraph carefully and skim the rest. Some readers will only skim, looking for action items. And this isn’t as simple as the “nature” of each individual; depending on other factors like their interest in the topic and how busy they are when they receive your message, one person might read this email carefully beginning to end but skim the next one you send.

So: How do you get the people to whom you are speaking (or writing) to absorb and retain the most crucial information? The answer is, in fact, another B:

• Bullet points

Bullet points are critical for brevity and conciseness in writing and also in speaking. If you have heretofore thought of bullet points solely as a convention of typography or the written word—today’s the day you start thinking otherwise.

“Bullet point” means two things. In typography it refers to the actual glyph, the • bullet that introduces a list item. That glyph is interchangeably called “the bullet” or “the bullet point.” It should not be confused with the · middle dot. “Bullet point” also refers to the item that follows the bullet glyph, whether that’s a word, a phrase, a sentence, or even a paragraph. Several of these items together, each proceeded by a bullet, make a bullet list.

In rhetoric, the “bullet point” or “bullet list” has nothing to do with typography—it’s just a simpler name for the rhetorical device eutrepismus. Eutrepismus is rounding up all the parts of your argument or the topic and enumerating them for the audience before you start diving into the details. I might explain and also illustrate eutrepismus thus:

• First, you will gather all of your most important, top-level points in your mind.

• Second, you will communicate each one to the audience in succession as I am doing here.

• Third and finally, you will elaborate on each point in order, referring back to the same phrasing as you used in step two.

When you do this verbally, you give the listening audience a mental framework for what they are about to hear so they’re not distracted wondering when they’re going to hear about the part they’re interested in or how it’s all going to fit together. Importantly, not all of your listeners want to hear everything you’re going to say. Some of them will only be interested in part of what you’re going go talk about. Letting them know approximately when (in order of discussion) you’ll get to that thing will help them focus and retain more.

This is a critical tactic for dispensing instructions, too. If you have enough instructions that they require a full page of text to communicate, many users are not going to bother. They will see the length of the message and not read it. This phenomenon gives rise to the ubiquitous joke in publishing that “authors can’t read”—because we give them a frankly inhumane amount of written instruction and they do not have time to ingest all of it.

But you can get them (authors and others) to read some—at least some—of what you need them to know by launching with a bullet list. For example:

This message contains instructions for reviewing your proof. Please:

• Download your proof

• Mark your corrections on the proof

• Return the proof by X date

Instructions for downloading, correcting, and returning your proof follow.

Some authors will read the entire email and all the instructions, but in my experience about 99 percent of authors only read the bullet list and the bullet list contains the things that are most important. They need to correct the proof and return it to me. If they need guidance on how to do that, they’ve been told where to find it. 

On the other hand if I sent them this:

Your proofs are now available for download at the following FTP site. The username and password for this site are the same as your username and password for accessing your author portal. You will find your proofs in a folder labeled with your last name and the book’s ISBN.

After you have downloaded your proofs, open them in Adobe Acrobat. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, you can download it by going to. . . .

And so on. Again, 99 percent of authors stopped reading after “your proofs are now available for download”; they stopped reading and went to the FTP site to find their proofs. Then they opened their proofs and began reading them. They did not get anywhere near the part of the message where they might see their deadline for returning proofs. Further, if the author who stopped reading at that point tries to open the proof and doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat, there’s chance they will go back to the email and see if it contained instructions and there’s a chance they won’t bother to do that and instead will send me a note—or worse, call me on the phone—to ask me what to do.

Some among us, myself included (especially myself), are inclined to give all the information someone might need to that person up front so they will have it readily accessible in case they need it so they won’t come bother us later. This backfires a lot of the time because we give someone so much information that they don’t bother trying to read through it all, go immediately to the task at hand and try to wing it, and then get frustrated and—come bother us.

That’s it, that’s my big secret for speaking effectively to groups, sending emails that get recipients to actually do stuff, and sometimes even writing articles that people read all the way to the end. Be brief (and concise, when you can); employ bullet points. Last tip: However much time you are given to speak, unless the organizers have specifically reserved Q&A time at the end, plan your presentation to end with about 10 percent of your time left over.  If you have 5 minutes, speak for 4 and a half; 10 minutes? Speak for 9. An hour? Speak for about 55 minutes max.

Everybody likes being done early.

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