Clarity comes first on our list for good reason: Unless you are clear, your speech will fail from the outset. This may seem obvious, but it is often ignored! Many speakers lapse into jargon, using technical language before an audience that doesn’t understand it. Technical vocabularies are necessary for specialized communication in many professions, but when speakers use these vocabularies with listeners who may not understand their meaning, problems are sure to arise. “Positive vorticity adjective” may be a perfectly useful expression at a convention of meteorologists, but for general audiences “It’s going to rain” would be much better. Speakers who fall into the jargon trap forget how much time and trouble it took for them to acquire a technical vocabulary, so they don’t bother to translate the unusual terms into lay language. Therefore they march happily forward into a jungle of unfamiliar verbiage, leaving their bewildered listeners lost behind them. The cost can be more than confusion.
Closely related to jargon are words that are needlessly overblown. A notorious example occurred at the Barnum museum, when sign makers wanted to tell visitors how they could leave the building. Rather than a simple arrow with “Exit” over it, these wordsmiths came up with “To The Egress.” There’s no telling how many visitors left the museum by mistake, thinking that they were going to see that rare creature—a living, breathing “Egress.”
While misunderstandings may result from such innocent incompetence, at other times jargon can seem purposely befuddling. Some speakers like to satisfy their egos and intimidate others by displaying their technical vocabularies. The parent of a student in Houston received a message from the high school principal regarding a special meeting on a proposed educational program. The message read:
Our school’s cross-graded, multi ethnic, individualized learning program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning program with emphasis on a continuum of multi ethnic, academically enriched learning, using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross- graded, multi ethnic learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person.
The parent responded:
Dear Principal: I have a college degree, speak two foreign languages and know four Indian dialects. I’ve attended a number of county fairs and three goat roping s, but I haven’t the faintest idea as to what you are talking about. Do you?
While some people seem to take a strange joy in not communicating, others ma try to hide the truth behind a smokescreen of techno babble that is closely related to the problem of euphemism we discussed earlier. Public television commentator Bill Moyers warned an audience at the University of Texas against the dangers of such jargon:
If you would . . . serve democracy well, you must first save the language. Save it from the jargon of insiders who talk of the current budget debate in Washington as “mega policy choices between freeze- feasible base lines.” (Sounds more like a baseball game played in the Arctic Circle.) Save it from the smokescreen artists, who speak of “revenue enhancement” and “tax-base erosion control” when they really mean a tax increase. . . . Save it from .. . the official revisionists of reality, who say that the United States did not withdraw our troops from Lebanon, we merely “back loaded our augmentation personnel.”
Fearing what might happen if audiences actually understood their meaning. such speakers attempt to hide behind cloudy technical language. In contrast, ethical speaking is clear and direct.
One way to achieve clarity is through amplification, in which you rephrase ideas to emphasize or clarify them. Providing important bits of. information and giving examples that compare and contrast are other ways to amplify an idea. In effect, you tell listeners something, then you expand and repeat what you are saying. Observe the techniques of amplification at work in the following speech sample, in which each sentence expands and repeats the meaning of the sentence that precedes it:
The roadrunner is not just a cartoon character that makes a fool of
Wile E. Coyote. It is a member of the cuckoo family and state bird of New Mexico. Still, the cartoon roadrunner and the real roadrunner
have much in common. Both are incredibly fast, real roadrunners having been tracked at ground speeds over 15 miles per hour. Neither
takes to the air to chase prey or escape a predator. Both look rather
awkward as they run, with strides up to 2ô inches long—a real feat for a bird that is only 24 inches long with over half its length in its tail.
The