08 Oct One of the most common mistakes in communicating is skimping on detail.

Business Communications

One of the most common mistakes in communicating is skimping on detail. This is especially easy to do when your topic is one for which you have a great interest and passion. You can get so excited you tend to forget not everyone in your audience has the same level of knowledge and curiosity as you do for a particular topic. The result is our rushed or clipped explanation full of assumptions and lacking in substance.

Another risk of a topic you love is feeling as if you already know so much there is no need to learn more. But it is easy to become so enveloped in confidence about your knowledge, you forget new knowledge is being added to every topic every single day.

Finally, recall the lesson learned about the importance of detail in Module 7. Detail ensures the substance that demonstrates respect for the audience’s time and needs by delivering knowledge they did not already have. And that makes communication more ethical.

As with all aspects of effective communication, it is critical to consider the audience in order to understand the sort of detailed substance to include in a message. An odd but effective mind game is to think of your audience as infant aliens from outer space. Not only have they just been hatched into the world with no prior experience but they are also not from this world, so you need to explain everything to them from scratch, as they have no foundation or starting point on which you can build.

With this in mind, think of the last thing you learned, and engage in the following discussion.

Discussion Question

Did whoever taught you the last think you learned provide enough detail? How do you know?

How did the detail – or lack of detail – impact your interest and/or satisfaction in learning this thing?

What does it mean to have good detail? What, in other words, does good detail consist of?

DQ2 Discussion Introduction

In business, we might think of a presentation as an occasion to dread – time taken away from our already packed workday to listen to a person in a suit at the front of a room reading from a PowerPoint; but there is no reason for a presentation to be so cliché and stale.

Check back to this Module’s Lesson on the top 10 most influential presentations in business. A good presentation is one that should engage the audience, inform them, challenge them, make them think, and motivate them to keep thinking when they leave. A good presentation generates conversation about a topic in a way that enables the presentation to take on a life of its own in the actions it inspires among the audience members. It plants the seeds of inspiration, moving the audience them to think of things in new ways, and eager to try out their ideas.

While some presenters are naturally gifted with crowd-charming charisma, making any topic seem mesmerizing, there are some strategies you can apply to create a presentation that won’t put your audience to sleep. By identifying past presentations that have captured and enraptured you, you can begin to see some common characteristics emerge; and then you can apply those to develop your own unforgettable presentations.

Discussion Question

Describe the best and the worst presentation you have ever seen. It could be a concert, a conference, a classroom lecture – anything.

Tell specifically what made it so good or so bad, and what you learned to enhance your own communication skills.