3 Reason Why Great Writing Produces Great Presentations
“If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour”. – Dianna Daniels Booher
Viewing the title of this article, you may be saying to yourself, “Of course, writing well helps us to speak well.” However, have you ever taken the time to really think why this is so? Hopefully, this article will encourage you to write more and discover the vein of gold between your ears.
In this article we will explore three reasons why your writing will actually improve your public speaking: writing helps you clarify your thinking, reduces your anxiety, and “mines” your thoughts for the material in your presentations.
Writing Helps You Clarify Your Thinking
There are thousands of thoughts that pass through your brain every day. Some of those thoughts will literally make you a million bucks if you can capture and develop them.
Have you ever had a really great thought that would be a great idea for a new business or improve your relationship with your daughter or solve that seemingly unsolvable problem at work? In the next minute after that thought, the thought is fuzzy to you and fading fast until eventually you cannot remember the essence of or even the thought itself?
There is an old Chinese proverb, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” What writing does for your speaking is it allows you to see your words in “black and white.” You can arrange and rearrange your words until you are satisfied with the way they sound. This is especially easy to do through your computer word processor.
In an earlier article, I talked about the Cards on the Wall exercise. This is a great example of how writing helps you clarify your thinking when it comes to your speaking. So what is the Cards on the Wall method? Let me refresh your memory. In Cards on the Wall, you write each topic idea you generate on a separate Post It note and then logically group them on a board. After all your ideas are on the board, you will magically start seeing patterns of your ideas emerging. These patterns become the main points of your presentation. Use Cards on the Wall and you will never lack for main points for your presentations.
An added benefit of writing is it actually lowers your anxiety.
Writing Helps to Reduce Your Anxiety
I am not a psychologist, but I do know that a great way to relieve anxiety concerning your presentations is to keep a journal. Why is this so? A large part of anxiety in preparing your presentations is due to having all these ideas flowing in your “grey cells” with no “traffic cop” to ensure there are no collisions. Your writing is the “traffic cop”
Quite often, you may be thinking you are not accomplishing much while you are preparing your presentations. This increases your anxiety and actually sabotages your “creative juices.” Writing out your presentation can give you a great sense of accomplishing something which will reduce your stress concerning your presentation.
You can choose to write out the words or write bullets for the main ideas. The bullets are what is on the cards in the Cards on the Wall exercise.
Writing the actual words or bullets of your presentation early in your preparation process will improve your disposition, reduce your stress, and encourage you to finish the task of creating your presentation. Try this. After you have done some writing for your presentation, ask those you love whether you seem more relaxed, more pleasant, and more willing to help others. It will be a resounding YES!
Closely akin of writing enabling you to clarify your thoughts and lessen your anxiety is it helps you to “mine” your thoughts for ideas that might or might not make it into your presentation. The key here is to get a lot of ideas on paper where you can then “separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Writing Well Helps Us to “Mine” Your Thoughts
I talked previously about benefits of keeping a daily journal. Because you are a speaker, keeping a journal has the added benefit of recording your thoughts that will more often than not be fleeting if you don’t write them down. Jeanne Robertson wrote a whole book on this called, “Don’t Let the Funny Stuff Get Away!.”
Don’t make the mistake of thinking an idea has to be immediately applied to a presentation you have in the works. The best writers ideas know that thoughts that pop into your head are not immediately applicable to something they are writing. It is the same with you.
As a speaker, you should keep a daily journal where you can document all your fleeting thoughts so they will not be lost. These ideas become the kernels of your future presentations or can add greatly to your current presentation projects.
Earl Nightingale says, “Writing down your ideas when you get them is like mining in a vein of pure gold. Your mind is that and much more.”
Earl Nightingale goes on to say that startling things happen when you roll your ideas on the rotisserie of your mind. How’s that for symbolism?
You should periodically read through your journal. An idea in your journal may be applicable to one of your presentation projects now whereas a month ago when you recorded it in your daily journal, it wasn’t.
In this article, we have explored three reasons why your writing will actually improve your public speaking: writing helps you clarify your thinking, reduce your anxiety, and “mines” your thoughts for the material in your present and future presentations.
Write down the ideas in your head. They provide a treasure trove of material for a whole host of your presentations. You will be glad you did!
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page .” – Jodi Picoult
Looking for professional services to help you significantly increase your influence with your audiences? Contact DiBartolomeo Consulting International (DCI) at info@speakleadandsucceed.com or (703) 815-1324