photo credit: Ogden Pioneer Days Rodeo by Cauldron Graphix, on Flickr

Picture this: marry your communication channels

One of the best things you can do to be effective as a speaker is to remember the worst or the best high school history teacher you had.

I was fortunate to have two contrasting history teachers. One stood at the front and bombarded us with facts, figures, names and wars. My head filled up quickly, and then emptied. The other told stories that gave context to the detail we got from the textbook and his handouts, made the detail memorable, made it make sense. His lessons still stick with me today.

Psychologists tell us that short-term memory can hold, on average, seven discrete items. You can hold incredibly complex material in long-term memory, but it takes time to transfer it, like an older flash drive. When short-term memory overfills before it can process its contents, it tends to just dump.

That helps explain the strengths of the two major communication channels: reading/writing, and hearing/speaking.

“Out loud” is great for giving the “big picture”–setting context, showing the relationship among the pieces, etc. But for most people, “out loud” doesn’t work well for detail. Memory studies show that we forget most of what we hear, but we do retain impressions because of the emotional connections that “out loud” also excels at creating.

Written information is best for mastering detail, since you can go over it more than once, and you can process it at your own speed. But it’s also easy to get lost among that detail and miss seeing the big picture.

Put them together!

If you want your audience to remember specific details, give them a handout, or at least a link to a Web page they can reference later. (Don’t yield to the temptation of creating a slideument–a slide deck that tries to act as visual support and also a document. The slides are too detailed to be speech support, but not detailed enough to be an effective document. Make a real handout.)

On the other hand, if audience members could get the big picture from the document and make the emotional connection that gives it meaning, they wouldn’t need to spend the time and money to come hear a speaker! Corporations and associations continue to pay speakers because the “out loud” part is essential in setting the context that makes the details meaningful, and therefore makes the investment a good one.

Remember: you give your audience your best service by keeping straight which communication channel is best for which task. And then put the two together effectively.