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The speaker's job is NOT to exhaust the details of information.
The speaker's job is to convey the theme of that information.

Clarity Requires a Headline

Your audience must answer the question, "What did the speaker say?" And that inner reporter will not have time to repeat your entire 5 minute, 15 minute, or 5 hour speech.

Every listener is a reporter who will reduce your entire presentation down into a one sentence answer: "The speaker said that …"

If you, as the speaker, do not provide a clear, concise headline, then every listener will fill in that blank with whatever THEY want, whether YOU like it or not.

Worse, and more common, the speaker provides so much un-clarified content that the listener can't identify one clear headline.

Let's use the "How SpeechDeck Works presentation" as an example.

When someone (a reporter) comes to our web site, he or she asks "What":

What is SpeechDeck?

We want to give the reporter the answer to the question "What." If we don't give the headline, some people will say "it is a deck of cards" and others would say "it's an online web app" and others would say "I don't know."

Let's eliminate all the ambiguity by following the steps on the Headline card.

Step 1: Articulate your Objective

You cannot create a clear headline until you know what you want to achieve. If you don't know what you want, the listener won't either, and they won't give it to you, even if they want to.

Common objectives include persuading the listener to buy a product, see a new perspective, understand or remember something new, make a commitment, participate in an experience, feel an emotion, give a response, or re-prioritize values.

In our SpeechDeck example, here is our objective:

We want the listener to buy SpeechDeck.

Step 2: Identify a single theme

When you communicate through written word, you can provide as much information as you want. Written communication can be as complex and as thorough as you choose, because the READER can absorb the information in any order and at any speed.

Verbal presentations are different. A listener only takes away what the listener can remember, and the fact is that most listeners don't remember much.

In psychological studies, even the most highly interested and concentrating listeners remember only a few main points. After about 15 minutes of speaking, the rate of recall drops like a rock.

In the best case scenario for a verbal message is that one or two listeners, who really care and scrutinize your every word, might remember 4 or 5 things. But that is the exception.

The rule, proven in scientific study after study, is that most listeners remember less than 3 things.

A Clear Headline Requires a SINGLE theme

The solution is to craft a message with the assumption that the listener remembers just ONE thing.

You must make one message, one theme, one point so clear, that the reporter living inside the listener's brain will know exactly what headline to put at the top of the report.

It should be so easy for the listener to write a headline in your words, that no listener will go through the trouble of rephrasing, rewording, or misrepresenting your message.

If you do not set a single theme, then the listener who only remembers one thing will focus on whatever random illustration catches their attention rather than the message that helps you achieve your objective.

This is the reason for step two on the headline card. Ask yourself, "If the listener remembers only one message that will help you attain your objective, what should it be?"

Public speaking courses commonly teach you to limit your presentation to about "3 main points." Those points are NOT your headline! Those points are your storyline. The headline is the overarching theme that unifies all of those points.

Write out that one single theme in the form of a sentence. In the SpeechDeck presentation our theme is:

SpeechDeck is a public speaking system that helps you make your communication more engaging.

Step 3: Create a Headline

A Clear Headline is Concise

Just like the headline of a news report has limited space, the memory of the listener has limited space. Like the title of a book, the headline must be short enough to fit on the cover, or at the top of the story.

There is no hard and fast rule for the maximum length of a headline, but as long as the headline captures your theme, shorter is better. The best headlines generally include a subject and a verb, so the minimum headline is two or three words.

If you tell the headline to a friend and they cannot remember how to repeat it back to you, word-for-word, it's too long.

We simplified our theme to just a few words:

SpeechDeck helps people speak in color.

A Clear Headline is Clever

Many of the techniques for "Engaging the Subconscious" S1 can be used to make your headline clever:

• Rhymes
• Alliteration
• Visual Imagery S203
• Effects S103
• Sensation S201
• Rhythm
• Opposition S303
• Patterns S304
• Metaphor

Incorporate any one or more of these tehcniques to make your headline clever.

While we couldn't incorporate a lot of cleverness into our headline, we chose to replace our long theme with a shorter visual metaphor: color.

A Clear Headline is Confident

Is SpeechDeck perfect? Of course not. No product is. But nobody would remember us if the headline said "SpeechDeck might help" or "Color might help." Our headline is worded without ambiguity or doubt:

SpeechDeck helps people speak in color.

A Clear Headline is Relevant

Target the headline directly at a single listener I201 and highlight the personal application of your message (I203, I205, I206)

To help personalize our headline and make it relevant to the individual, we changed the word "people" to the word "you." Our complete headline is below:

SpeechDeck helps you speak in color.

A Clear Headline is Pervasive

EVERYTHING in your presentation must relate to this headline.

If you cannot relate an illustration to your headline, then

• EITHER the illustration is not relevant to your presentation and should be eliminated
• OR your headline is not worded correctly.

When you follow this pattern, everything you say will tie together. You will repeat the keywords from your headline often, and the listener will leave with your headline burned into his or her memory.

Your headline is not a one-time statement. Elements of your headline will permeate everything you say during your entire presentation.

You will find in our presentation that we repeat an reemphasize the keywords, "SpeechDeck," and "color."

Headlines make Clarity Easy

Clarifying your Headline can be hard, but it is the single most important thing you can do to give a great presentation. If you can't articulate your message in one clear, concise headline, you cannot expect the reporter will be able to articulate it either.

Once you can articulate a clear headline, everything else becomes easier. You will not be at a loss for words, because everything you say will relate to just one statement. Also you will automatically be able to filter what is relevant and what is not.

A great presentation is actually much easier than a bad one. When presenting verbally, the person who says LESS (in terms of subject quantity), is usually the better speaker. Writing a headline makes your speech much easier because you don't have to write a book—you only have to say ONE thing.

Less Information is Better than More Headlines

However, it is sometimes appropriate to have multiple headlines. When neccessary, take a long presentation and treat each subsection as a separate speech.

You can view each illustration and story point as a self contained speech with its own mini-headline. In the course of a long seminar, you don't give just one speech, you give several related speeches.

Share less information

There are no hard and fast rules, but if you have more than one headline in 10-15 minutes, you will probably not be clear.

Beginning speakers, and speakers who have been trained incorrectly often try to say 3, 5 or 10 different things in 10 minutes. If you want to say lots of things, write a book. If you want to give a clear speech, write one headline.

A boring presenter can say a lot of black and white in 10 minutes; an engaging presenter says just one thing, but with color. Click Here for Tutorial on Adding Color.

A colorful speech will take more words and more time to deliver the same amount of information. But it's worth it, because instead of the listener hearing a lot and remembering next to nothing, the listener will remember the very thing you want them to remember, and you will achieve your objective!

SpeechDeck Techniques Require a Headline

Regardless of your presentation structure and no matter what your illustration of the moment, each SpeechDeck technique applies to a specific black and white content card. Whichever card you are referencing will have a headline sentence.

Enforcing that highly structured logic is the only way you can ensure that your content clear.

If you want people to listen to you, and you want to have a lasting influence on them when you are finished speaking, clarify your headline!