How to Make Your Meaning Clear

Chapter 10

A famous English bishop, during World War I, spoke to some unlettered troops at Camp Upton. They were on their way to the trenches; but a very small per­centage of them had any adequate idea why they were being sent. I know: I questioned them. Yet the Lord Bishop talked to these men about “international amity,” and “Serbia’s right to a place in the sun.” Why, the half of them did not know whether Serbia was a town or a disease. He might as well, as far as results were concerned, have delivered a sonorous eulogy on the Nebular Hypothesis. However, not a single trooper left the hall while he was speaking: the military police with revolvers were stationed at every exit to prevent it.
I do not wish to belittle the bishop. Before a body of collegiate men he would probably have been powerful; but he failed with these soldiers, and he failed utterly: he did not know his audience, and he evidently knew neither the precise purpose of his talk nor how to accomplish it.
What do we mean by the purpose of an address? Just this: every talk, regardless of whether the speaker realizes it or not, has one of four major goals. What are they?

1. To make something clear.
2. To impress and convince.
3. To get action.
4. To entertain.

Let us illustrate these by a series of concrete examples.
Lincoln, who was always more or less interested in mechanics, once invented and patented a device for lifting stranded boats off sand bars and other obstructions. He worked in a mechanic’s shop near his law office, making a model of his apparatus. Although the device finally came to naught, he was decidedly enthusiastic over its possibili­ties. When friends came to his office to view the model, he took no end of pains to explain it. The main purpose of those explanations was clearness.
When he delivered his immortal oration at Gettysburg, when he gave his first and second inaugural addresses, when Henry Clay died and Lincoln delivered a eulogy on his life—on all these occasions, Lincoln’s main purpose was impressiveness and conviction. He had to be clear, of course, before he could be convincing; but, in these in­ stances, clearness was not his major consideration.
In his talks to juries, he tried to win favorable decisions.
In his political talks, he tried to win votes. His purpose, then, was action.
Two years before he was elected President, Lincoln prepared a lecture on Inventions. His purpose was entertainment. At least, that should have been his goal; but he was evidently not very successful in attaining it. His career as a popular lecturer was, in fact, a distinct disappointment. In one town, not a person came to hear him.
But he did succeed and he succeeded famously in the other speeches of his that I have referred to. And why? Because, in those instances, he knew his goal, and he knew how to achieve it. He knew where he wanted to go and how to get there. And because so many speakers don’t know just that, they often flounder and come to grief.
For example: I once saw a United States Congressman hooted and hissed and forced to leave the stage of the old New York Hippodrome, because he had—unconsciously, no doubt, but nevertheless, unwisely—chosen clearness as his goal. It was during the war. He talked to his audience about how the United States was preparing. The crowd did not want to be instructed. They wanted to be entertained. They listened to him patiently, politely, for ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, hoping the performances would come to a rapid end. But it didn’t. He rambled on and on; patience snapped; the audience would not stand for more. Someone began to cheer ironically. Others took it up. In a moment, a thousand people were whistling and shouting. The speaker, obtuse and incapable as he was of sensing the temper of his audience, had the bad taste to continue. That aroused them. A battle was on. Their impatience mounted to ire. They determined to silence him. Louder and louder grew their storm of protest. Finally, the roar of it, the anger of it drowned his words—he could not have been heard twenty feet away. So he was forced to give up, acknowledge defeat, and retire in humiliation.
Profit by his example. Know your goal. Choose it wisely before you set out to prepare your talk. Know how to reach it. Then set about it, doing it skilfully and with science.

Use Comparisons to Promote Clearness

As to clearness: do not underestimate the im­portance of it or the difficulty. I once heard a certain Irish poet give an evening of readings from his own poems. Not ten per cent of the audience, half the time, knew what he was talking about. Many talkers, both in public and private, are a lot like that.
When I discussed the essentials of public speaking with Sir Oliver Lodge, a man who had been lecturing to university classes and to the public for forty years, he emphasized most of all the importance, first, of knowledge and preparation; second, of “taking good pains to be clear.”
General Von Moltke, at the outbreak of the Franco­–Prussian War, said to his officers: “Remember, gentlemen, that any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood.”
Napoleon recognized the same danger. His most emphatic and oft-reiterated instruction to his secretaries was: “Be clear! Be clear!”
When the disciples asked Christ why he taught the public by parables, he answered: ‘’Because they seeing, see not: and hearing, hear not; neither do they understand.”
And when you talk on a subject strange to your hearer or hearers, can you hope that they will understand you any more readily than people understood the Master?
Hardly. So what can we do about it? What did he do when confronted by a similar situation? Solved it in the most simple and natural manner imaginable: described the things people did not know by likening them to things they did know. The kingdom of Heaven… what would it be like? How could those untutored peasants of Palestine know? So Christ described it in terms of objects and actions with which they were already familiar:
The kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a mer­chantman seeking goodly pearls…
Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea…
That was lucid; they could understand that. The house­ wives in the audience were using leaven every week; the fishermen were casting their nets into the sea daily; the merchants were dealing in pearls.
And how did David make clear the watchfulness and loving kindness of Jehovah?
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters…
Green grazing grounds in that almost barren country… still waters where the sheep could drink—those pastoral people could understand that.
Here is a rather striking and half-amusing example of the use of this principle: some missionaries were translating the Bible into the dialect of a tribe living near equatorial Africa. They progressed to the verse: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” How were they to translate that? Literally? Meaningless. Absurd The natives had never scooped off the sidewalk on a February morning. They did not even have a word for snow. They could not have told the difference between snow and coal tar; but they had climbed coconut trees many times and shaken down a few nuts for lunch; so the missionaries likened the unknown to the known, and changed the verse to read: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as the meat of a coconut.”
Under the circumstances, it would be hard to improve on that, wouldn’t it?
At the State Teachers’ College at Warrens burg, Mis­souri, I once heard a lecturer on Alaska who failed, in many places, to be either clear or interesting because, unlike those African missionaries, he neglected to talk in terms of what his audience knew. He told us, for example, that Alaska had a gross area of 590,804 square miles, and a population of 64,356.
Half a million square miles—what does that mean to the average man? Precious little. He is not used to thinking in terms of square miles. They conjure up no mental picture. He does not have any idea whether half a million square miles are approximately the size of Maine or Texas. Suppose the speaker had said that the coast line of Alaska and its islands is longer than the distance around the globe, and that its area more than equals the combined areas of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee. Would not that give everyone a fairly clear conception of the area of Alaska?
He said the population was 64,356. The chances are that not one person in ten remembered the census figures for five minutes—or even one minute. Why? Because the rapid saying of “sixty-four thousand, three hundred and fifty-six” does not make a very clear impression. It leaves only a loose, insecure impression, like words written on the sand of the seashore. The next wave of attention quite obliterates them. Would it not have been better to have stated the census in terms of something with which they were very familiar? For example: St. Joseph was not very far away from that little Missouri town where the audience lived. Many of them had been to St. Joseph; and, Alaska had, at that time, ten thousand fewer people than St. Joseph. Better still, why not talk about Alaska in tennis of the very town where you are speaking? Wouldn’t the speaker have been far clearer had he said: “Alaska is eight times as large as the state of Missouri; yet it has only thirteen times as many people as live right here in Warrensburg”?
In the following illustrations, which are the clearer, the a statement or the b?
a. Our nearest star is thirty-five trillion miles away.
b. A train going at the rate of a mile a minute would reach our nearest star in forty-eight million years; if a song were sung there and the sound could travel here it would be three million, eight hundred thousand years before we could hear it. A spider’s thread reaching to it would weigh five hundred tons.
a. St. Peter’s, the biggest church in the world, is 232 yards long, and 364 feet wide.
b. It is about the size of two buildings like the Capitol at Washington piled on top of one another.
Sir Oliver Lodge happily used this method when explaining the size and nature of atoms to a popular audience. I heard him tell a European audience that there were as many atoms in a drop of water as there were drops of water in the Mediterranean Sea; and many of his hearers had spent over a week sailing from Gibraltar to the Suez Canal. To bring the matter still closer home, he said there were as many atoms in one drop of water as there were blades of grass on all the earth.
Richard Harding Davis told a New York audience that the Mosque of St. Sophia was “about as big as the audi­torium of the Fifth Avenue theater.” He said Brindisi “looks like Long Island City when you come into it from the rear.”
Use this principle henceforth in your talks. If you are describing the great pyramid, first tell your hearers it is 451 feet, then tell them how high that is in terms of some building they see every day. Tell how many city blocks the base would cover. Don’t speak about so many thousand gallons of this or so many hundred thousand barrels of that without also telling how many rooms the size of the one you are speaking in could be filled with that much liquid. Instead of saying twenty feet high, why not say one and a half times as high as this ceiling. Instead of talking about distance in terms of rods or miles, is it not dearer to say as far as from here to the union station, or to such and such a street?

Avoid Technical Terms

If you belong to a profession the work of which is technical—if you are a lawyer, a physician, an engineer, or are in a highly specialized line of business—be doubly careful when you talk to outsiders, to express yourself in plain terms and to give necessary details.
I say be doubly careful, for, as a part of my professional duties, I have listened to hundreds of speeches that failed right at this point and failed woefully. The speakers appeared totally unconscious of the general public’s widespread and profound ignorance regarding their particular specialties. So what happened? They rambled on and on, uttering thoughts, using phrases that fitted into their experience and were instantly and continuously meaningful to them; but to the uninitiated, they were about as clear as the Mississippi River after the June rains have fallen on the newly-plowed com fields of Iowa and Kansas.
What should such a speaker do? He ought to read and heed the following advice from the facile pen of ex-Senator Beveridge of Indiana:
It is a good practice to pick out the least intelligent looking person in the audience and strive to make that person interested in your argument. This can be done only by lucid statement of fact and clear reasoning. An even better method is to center your talk on some small boy or girl present with parents.
Say to yourself—say out loud to your audience, if you like—that you will try to be so plain that the child will understand and remember your explanation of the question discussed, and after the meeting be able to tell what you have said.
I remember hearing a physician remark in the course of his talk that “diaphragmatic breathing is a distinct aid to the peristaltic action of the intestines and a boon to health.” He was about to dismiss that phase of his talk with that one sentence and to rush on to something else. I stopped him; and asked for a show of hands of those who had a clear conception of how diaphragmatic breathing differs from other kinds of breathing, why it is especially bene­ficial to physical well-being and what peristaltic action is. The result of the vote surprised the doctor; so he went back, explained, enlarged in this fashion:
The diaphragm is a thin muscle forming the floor of the chest at the base of the lungs and the roof of the abdominal cavity. When inactive and during chest breathing, it is arched like an inverted washbowl.
In abdominal breathing every breath forces this muscular arch down until it becomes nearly fiat and you can feel your stomach muscles pressing against your belt. This downward pressure of the diaphragm massages and stimulates the organs of the upper part of the abdominal cavity—the stomach, the liver, the pancreas, the spleen, the solar plexus.
When you breathe out again, your stomach and your intestines will be forced up against the diaphragm and will be given another massage. This massaging helps the process of elimination.
A vast amount of ill health originates in the intestines.
Most indigestion, constipation, and auto-intoxication would disappear if our stomachs and intestines were properly exercised through deep diaphragmatic breath­ing.

The Secret of Lincoln’s Clearness

Lincoln had a deep and abiding affection for putting a proposition so that it would be instantly clear to everyone. In his first message to Congress, he used the phrase “sugar-coated.” Mr. Defrees, the public printer, being Lincoln’s personal friend, suggested to him that although the phrase might be all right for a stump speech in Illinois, it was not dignified enough for a historical state paper. “Well, Defrees,” Lincoln replied, “if you think the time will ever come when the people will not understand what ‘sugar-coated’ means, I’ll alter it; otherwise, I think I’ll let it go.”
He once explained to Dr. Gulliver, the president of Knox College, how he developed his “passion” for plain language, as he phrased it:
Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I don’t think I ever got angry at anything else in my life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out the exact meaning of some of their. to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to. when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it, and when I thought I had got it I was not satisfied until J had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough as I thought for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has since stuck by me.
A passion? Yes, it must have amounted to that, for Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster of New Salem, testified: “I have known Lincoln to study for hours the best way of three to express an idea.”
An all too common reason why people fail to be intelligible is this: the thing they wish to express is not clear even to themselves. Hazy impressions! Indistinct, vague ideas! The result? Their minds work no better in a mental fog than a camera does in a physical fog. They need to be as disturbed over obscurity and ambiguity as Lincoln was. They need to use his methods.

Appeal to the Sense of Sight

The nerves that lead from the eye to the brain are, as we observed in Chapter IV, many times larger than those leading from the ear; and science tells us that we give twenty-five times as much attention to eye suggestions as we do to ear suggestions.
“One seeing.” says an old Chinese proverb, “is better than a hundred times telling about.
So, if you wish to be clear, picture your points, visualize your ideas. That was the plan of the late John H. Patterson, president of the well-known National Cash Register Company. He wrote an article for System Magazine, outlining the methods he used in speaking to his workmen and his sales forces:
I hold that one cannot rely on speech alone to make himself understood or to gain and hold attention. A dramatic supplement is needed. It is better to supplement whenever possible with pictures which show the right and the wrong way; diagrams are more convincing than mere words, and pictures are more convincing than diagrams. The ideal presentation of a subject is one in which every subdivision is pictured and in which the words are used only to connect them. I early found that in dealing with men, a picture was worth more than anything I could say.
Little grotesque drawings are wonderfully effective… I have a whole system of cartooning or “chart talks.” A circle with a dollar mark means a piece of money, a bag marked with a dollar is a lot of money. Many good effects can be had with moon faces. Draw a circle, put in a few dashes for the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Twisting these lines gives the expressions. The out-of-date man has the corner of his mouth down; the chipper, up-to-date fellow has the curves up. The drawings are homely, but the most effective cartoonists are not the men who make the prettiest pictures; the thing is to express the idea and the contrast.
The big bag and the little bag of money, side by side, are the natural heads for the right way as opposed to the wrong way; the one brings much money, the other little money. If you sketch these rapidly as you talk, there is no danger of people’s letting their minds wander; they are bound to look at what you are doing and thus to go with you through the successive stages to the point you want to make. And again, the funny figures put people in good humor.
I used to employ an artist to hang around in the shops with me and quietly make sketches of things that were not being done right. Then the sketches were made into drawings and I called the men together and showed them exactly what they were doing. When I heard of the stereopticon I immediately bought one and projected the drawings on the screen, which, of course, made them even more effective than on paper. Then came the moving picture. I think that I had one of the first machines ever made and now we have a big department with many motion picture films and more than 60,000 colored stereopticon slides.
Not every subject or occasion, of course, lends itself to exhibits and drawings; but let us use them when we can. They attract attention, stimulate interest and often make our meaning doubly clear.

Rockefeller Raking Off the Coins

Mr. Rockefeller also used the columns of System Magazine to tell how he appealed to the sense of sight to make clear the financial situation of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company:
I found that they (the employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co.) imagined the Rockefellers had been drawing immense profits from their interests in Colorado; no end of people had told them so. I explained the exact situation to them. I showed them that during the fourteen years in which we had been connected with the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co., it had never paid one cent of dividends upon the common stock.
At one of our meetings, I gave a practical illustration of the finances of the company. I put a number of coins en the table. I swept off a portion which represented their wages—for the first claim upon the company is the pay roll. Then I took away more coins to represent the salaries of the officers, and then the remaining coins to represent the fees of the directors. There were no coins left for the stockholders. And when I asked: “Men, is it fair, in this corporation where we are all partners, that three of the partners should get all the earnings, be they large or small—all of them—and the fourth nothing?”
Make your eye appeals definite and specific. Paint mental pictures that stand out as sharp and clear as a stag’s hom silhouetted against the setting sun. For example, the word “dog” calls up a more or less definite picture of such an animal—perhaps a cocker spaniel, a Scotch terrier, a St. Bernard, or a Pomeranian. Notice how much more distinct an image springs into your mind when I say “bulldog”—the term is less inclusive. Doesn’t “a brindle bulldog’’ call up a still more explicit picture? Is it not more vivid to say “a black Shetland pony” than to talk of “a horse’’? Doesn’t “a white bantam rooster with a broken leg” give a much more definite and sharp picture than merely the word “fowl’’?

Restate Your Important Ideas in Different Words

Napoleon declared repetition to be the only serious principle of rhetoric. He knew that because an idea was clear to him was not always proof that it was instantly grasped by others. He knew that it takes time to compre­hend new ideas, that the mind must be kept focused on them. In short, he knew they must be repeated. Not in exactly the same language. People will rebel at that, and rightly so. But if the repetition is couched in fresh phraseology, if it is varied, your hearers will never regard it as repetition at all.
Let us take a specific example. The late Mr. Bryan said:
You cannot make people understand a subject, unless you understand that subject yourself. The more clearly you have a subject in mind, the more clearly can you present that subject to the minds of others.
The last sentence here is merely a restatement of the idea contained in the first; but when these sentences are spoken, the mind does not have time to see that it is repetition. It only feels that the subject has been made more clear.
I seldom teach a single session of my courses without hearing one or perhaps half a dozen talks that would have been more clear, more impressive, had the speaker but employed this principle of restatement. It is almost entirely ignored by the beginner. And what a pity!

Use General Illustrations and Specific Instances

One of the surest and easiest ways to make your points clear is to follow them with general illustrations and concrete cases. What is the difference between the two? One, as the term implies, is general; the other, specific.
Let us illustrate the difference between them and the uses of each with a concrete example. Suppose we take the statement: “There are professional men and women who earn astonishingly large incomes.”
Is that statement very clear? Have you a clear-cut idea of what the speaker really means? No, and the speaker himself cannot be sure of what such an assertion will call up in the minds of others. It may cause the country doctor in the Ozark Mountains to think of a family doctor in a small city with an income of five thousand. It may cause a successful mining engineer to think in terms of the men in his profession who make a hundred thousand a year. The statement, as it stands, is entirely too vague and loose. It needs to be tightened. A few illuminating details ought to be given to indicate what professions the speaker refers to and what he means by “astonishingly large.”
There are lawyers, prize fighters, song writers, novelists, playwrights, painters, actors and singers who make more than the President of the United States.
Now, hasn’t one a much dearer idea of what the speaker meant? However, he has not individualized. He has used general illustrations, not specific instances. He has said “singers,” not Rosa Ponselle, Kirsten Flagstad, or Lily Pons.
So the statement is still more or less vague. We cannot call up concrete cases to illustrate it. Should not the speaker do it for us? Would he not be clearer if he employed spe­cific examples—as is done in the following paragraph?
The great trial lawyers Samuel Untermeyer and Max Steuer earn as much as one million dollars a year. Jack Dempsey’s annual income bas been known to be as high as a half million dollars. Joe Louis, the young, uneducated Negro pugilist, while still in his twenties, earned more than a half million dollars. Irving Berlin’s rag­ time music is reported to have brought him a half million dollars yearly. Sidney Kingsley made ten thousand dol­lars a week royalty on his plays. H. G. Wells admitted, in his autobiography, that his pen had brought him three million dollars. Diego Rivera earned, from his paintings, more than a half a million dollars in a year. Katharine Cornell has repeatedly refused five thousand dollars a week to go into pictures.
Now, has not one an extremely plain and vivid idea of exactly and precisely what the speaker wanted to convey?
Be concrete. Be definite. Be specific. This quality of definiteness not only makes for clearness but for impressiveness and conviction and interest also.

Do Not Emulate the Mountain Goat

Professor William James, in one of his talks to teachers, paused to remark that one can make only one point in a lecture, and the lecture he referred to lasted an hour. Yet I recently heard a speaker, who was limited by a stop watch to three minutes, begin by saying that he wanted to call our attention to eleven points. Sixteen and a half seconds to each phase of his subject! Seems in­ credible, doesn’t it, that an intelligent man should attempt anything so manifestly absurd. True, I am quoting an extreme case; but the tendency to err in that fashion, if not to that degree, handicaps almost every novice. He is like a Cook’s guide who shows Paris to the tourist in one day. It can be done, just as one can walk through the American Museum of Natural History in thirty minutes. But neither clearness nor enjoyment results. Many a talk fails to be clear because the speaker seems intent upon establishing a world’s record for ground covered in the allotted time. He leaps from one point to another with the swiftness and agility of a mountain goat.
Most talks must be short, so cut your cloth accordingly. If, for example, you are to speak on Labor Unions, do not attempt to tell in three or six minutes why they came into existence, the methods they employ, the good they have accomplished, the evil they have wrought, and how to solve industrial disputes. No, no; if you strive to do that, no one will have a very clear conception of what you have said. It will be all confused, a blur, too sketchy, too much of a mere outline.
Wouldn’t it be the part of wisdom to take one phase and one phase only of labor unions, and cover that adequately and illustrate it? It would. That kind of speech leaves a single impression. It is lucid, easy to listen to, easy to remember.
However, if you must cover several phases of your topic, it is often advisable to summarize briefly at the end. Let us see how that suggestion operates. Here is a summary of this lesson. Does the reading of it help to make the message we have been presenting more lucid, more comprehensible?

Summary

1. To be clear is highly important and often very difficult. Christ declared that he had to teach by parables, “Because they (his hearers) seeing, see not; and hearing, hear not; neither do they understand.”
2. Christ made the unknown clear by talking of it in terms of the known, He likened the kingdom of heaven to leaven, to nets cast into the sea, to merchants buying pearls. “Go thou, and do likewise.” If you wish to give a clear conception of the size of Alaska, do not quote its area in square miles; name the states that could be put into it; enumerate its population in terms of the town where you are speaking.
3. Avoid technical terms when addressing a lay audi­ence. Follow Lincoln’s plan of putting your ideas into language plain enough for any boy or girl to comprehend.
4. Be sure that the thing you wish to speak about is first as clear as noonday sunshine in your own mind.
5. Appeal to the sense of sight Use exhibits, pictures, illustrations when possible. Be definite. Don’t say “dog” if you mean “a fox terrier with a black splotch over his right eye.”
6. Restate your big ideas; but don’t repeat, don’t use the same phrases twice. Vary the sentences, but reiterate the idea without letting your bearers detect it.
7. Make your abstract statement clear by following it with general illustrations—and what is often better still—by specific instances and concrete cases.
8. Do not strive to cover too many points. In a short speech, one cannot hope to treat adequately more than one or two phases of a big topic.
9. Close with a brief summary of your points.