My wife might be on to something. As neurologist Josef Parvizi told me, concision makes messages easier to receive, as it activates fewer processing systems in the brain.

There is also what we might call the “curse of passion”:

One of the most common mistakes we make in spontaneous communication is to overcommunicate. In line with the importance of listening to the room and thinking ahead about what kind of communication our audience is ready to have, many of us could stand to make our spontaneous communication more accessible. Complexity can stand in the way of some of

To project more openness and inclusivity, we can ask questions and try to find common ground. We might say something like, “In thinking about how to achieve this goal, I am curious about your thoughts on X.”

“Any time you’re thinking about resistance and how to combat it, you’re really thinking about defensiveness,” Social psychologist and Stanford GSB professor Zakary Tormala observes. Our challenge is to help reduce that defensiveness in others. “So taking a more open, agreeable, inclusive, and cooperative type approach with people generally

The best, most powerful communication in both formal and spontaneous situations is clear and sharply focused. It conveys everything an audience needs to receive the speaker’s desired message—and only that information. It doesn’t distract audience members, bore them, or waste their time by using verbiage that is fuzzy, irrelevant, impossibly dense,

just love What–So What–Now What. It’s my favorite structure of all time on account of its simplicity and versatility. You start by discussing an idea, topic, product, service, or argument (What). Then you explain why it’s important, helpful, or useful—why it matters and is relevant (So What). You end with what your audience should do from here with

As we become more fluid with structure, opportunities arise for creativity and expressiveness. Since we know where we are in our structure at any given point, we can pause in places to elaborate, experiment, or explore without fearing that we’ll become lost. As longtime improvisation instructor James Whittington notes, we can also make impromptu

spend that fifteen seconds choosing a structure and then very cursorily applying it to the topic. Considering the topic and audience, I ponder whether I might use a persuasive structure like Problem–Solution–Benefit, a chronological structure like Past–Present–Future, or a comparative structure like Comparison–Contrast–Conclusion. To my students’