Some people have a tendency to want to show people how smart they are.  They’ll use big words and complex phrases and it makes them feel good.  After all, it’s a good thing to show people how clever you are, right? WRONG!

The purpose of most presentations is to inform, influence or persuade.  To do do this, we need to be connected with our audience and we can’t connect if they don’t understand terminology we are using.  In fact, the opposite is happening.  The minute the brain can’t comprehend, it switches off.  The brain is a cognitive miser and doesn’t want to waste energy where it cant see the benefit. So the minute you come out with ‘sesquipedalian’, they are gone!

See, I almost lost you LOL!  By the way,‘sesquipedalian’ is actually an adjective to describe a word that is very long and multisyllabic.

So next time you are doing a speech or presentation, you don’t need to prove how smart you are, the audience are already there to listen to you as a perceived expert in your field.  Focus on delivering quality content and use language they understand and gets your point across.

Make sure you are using language which is directed to the majority of your audience.
To Your success

Con aka ‘The Con Versationalist’