Here is a quick lesson…
and it will help even more people to read what you take your valuable time to write…
because communication is NOT only about the words you write…
nor only about the reason you write your words…
nor only about your paragraph structure…
Communication is about how the person/people you are communicating to, interpret your words.
(and the same goes for speaking, body language, etc.)
As you can see what I’ve written above…
and you’re probably feeling pretty comfortable at this point…
and that may or may not change in the coming moments…
because while it took me some conscious practice to UNLEARN the incorrect way to communicate that I learned in several of my English classes in school…
I was taught you can’t begin sentences with words like “and”, “because”, and definitely not with “and as”…
and there’s surely no writing courses from any English department in any campus in the world that would condone my profusely obscene use of …
(those are called ellipses…I learned about them in college…and me now likey them a lot!)
Although interestingly enough, you can apparently still use things like commas, and still be relatively effective in your communication.
and please remember, communication is how your audience feels, perceives, and hears your message…
So what we’re going to do now is to turn DOWN the communication…and give you at least 2 other examples.
Please forgive me if you begin to now feel a bit more uncomfortable…
(and you’ll soon realize that it’s amazing how something as little as a few changes in my writing style can make you FEEL even more uncomfortable than you have been in the past few moments…
and you may also realize that yes, you too can impact how others FEEL on a consistent basis simply with your words!)
and CAUTION!!!
If this process makes you too uncomfortable at any point…
Please feel free to scroll down to the bottom of this post for some deep satisfaction!
Okay, now we are officially onto the “let’s make the audience slightly more uncomfortable. It begins subtly, and grows from there. It’s kind of like when you fall and you’re not quite sure if you’re injured yet, and as the pain level begins to rise, you begin to feel it even more and more.
This isn’t quite too bad, yet, correct? That’s likely because you have been reading paragraphs written in this sentence structure for most of your life, especially for many years in school, and your eyeballs attempt to adjust and go right back into their already deeply formed myelin highways. There are many other problems, and we’ll focus on one of them that is already beginning to take place. (and the problem is not as noticeable as you think it is, especially hidden by your already formed deep neural pathways.)
This aforementioned issue, is that the way your eyes work, and the way it delivers information into your visual cortex, is not congruent with the current way I am now writing. Let me explain what I mean by this, and you’ll soon see exactly what I mean, and how this negatively impacts your ability to effectively communicate with your audience.
Your eyes to NOT like to go back and forth, left to right, in long sentence structure. (More correctly said, your eyes actually don’t like to go right to left when starting a new sentence structure. I’ll give you a few moments to re-read that previous sentence as it’s the opposite of what you are used to reading, and your brain likely re-wrote the actual words in an effort to “shortcut”. (Read the “Click, Whirr” section in Cialdini’s book, “Influence”, Published/Year/citation: Not a chance in hell I’m going that far and looking that crap up)
and now since this is pure torture…
even for myself…
I’m going to put a visual marker here to even better drill in the lesson.
and now as your recovering from the above “relative uncomfort compared to the beauty we started with”…
I’m going to knock you upside the brain and going to make you extremely…
Well…let’s just say I’m about to communicate in a very INeffective way…
and as I do that…the lesson may even teach itself.
So let’s dive directly in…
Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to get this going with a few “seed sentences”, and then I’m just going to copy/paste entire paragraphs from above. The reason I’m doing that is because I’ve spent far too long developing my skills with using “whitespace”, “hypnotic language”, and “copywriting” to even bring myself to just write non-stop with no white space. Because the other part we left out above is that not only do your eyes hate to read long blocks of text from left to right/right to left; they also hate these giant blocks of text where they have to really fight to keep their spot on the page. Yes, things like using a visual marker can help immensely, because our eyes have been trained to be attracted to movement. (and just knowing that alone you can do wonders in speaking on stage/to a camera, perform amazing feats in martial arts, and even become a world renown magician!) This issue is further amplified with the advent of “speech to text” devices, and particularly the laziness (or naïvety) of the device user in wanting to add additional whitespace. So have you ever seen a giant block of text like this? I personally skip over them completely now-a-days, with the only exception being if someone really has the knowledge I want, and just hasn’t been trained in effective communication. Okay, apparently I lied above, I’m not just going to copy/paste information from above, because that would most surely create an invalid experiment as it would introduce a huge bias, nearly begging you to auto-skip to the end. So I’ll keep you in this world of mass pain for a bit longer, just to make sure this lesson sinks in very, very deeply. If you are still even reading at this point, I want you to now direct your attention to how you are feeling. Are you frustrated? Are your eyes more tired than when we started? If not yet, they will be! (it’s scientifically proven over and over again) If you’re now seeing these words, you have proven to be someone of particular iron-will, I want to commend you on that, and even suggest that you are particularly suited towards entrepreneurship, or other endeavors that require huge amounts of “stick-tuitiveness”.
Okay…I cannot take it any longer!
The lesson is done, and I’m pretty sure that you either:
1) Bailed out on this post.
2) Skipped down here to the end.
3) Read every – single – last – word…
So whomever you are…I hope you appreciated this lesson in:
EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
(and also a smidge of copywriting)
Here’s what I know…
If you can get even more people to PAY ATTENTION to your communication…
You can impact even more people than you already are…
and as long as your heart is in the right place…
that makes the world an even better place than it already is.
PS – I originally intended to teach the lessons here right at the bottom…
and I actually ended up teaching them inside the monster blocks of hell text from above.
So to properly give you the value you deserve from this post, please forgive me for communicating them extremely ineffectively above.
BOOM!
The lesson is complete.
and while I nearly always end everything with a “call to action”…
I’ll end with:
May the odds be ever in your favor.
(and no, I have no freaking idea where that came from…probably from ME being super wiped out from purposefully writing so crappily above!)
Great lesson, Jason!!!
I’m a #3 person/reader on this one.
hahahahaha
GREAT post 🙂
Reading this right before filling my autoresponder is great, too.
Appreciate yoU!!!!!!!!
I’m glad you got value out this Angela!! So awesome to hear from you and your autoresponder is looking GREAT!!