Say one thing your audience will remember

You will be able to write the core message of any talk as one complete sentence with a claim in it.

Think back to the last presentation you sat through at work. Can you say, in one sentence, what the speaker wanted you to take away? Often the honest answer is no. You might remember a slide, a joke, or that it ran over, but not the point.

That is not because audiences are lazy. Listening is harder than reading. A reader can slow down, skim back and reread a sentence. A listener gets each sentence once, at the speaker's pace, while also thinking about their inbox, the next meeting and whether they replied to that message from their manager. A talk with eight equally weighted points leaves them with none.

So the first job in preparing any talk, before slides and before rehearsal, is deciding what the audience should remember. That is the core message: one sentence, with a claim in it, that you want everyone to be able to repeat on the way out.

A topic is not a message. Third quarter results is a label for a slide deck. Compare it with this: sales grew last quarter, but only because of one client, so we need three new accounts by March. Or take onboarding update, and set it beside new hires take six weeks to get up to speed and moving training online would shorten that. The second version in each pair tells the audience what to think.

The difference shows up straight away in how you build the talk. With a topic, everything you know about it seems relevant, so it all goes in. With a message, you have a test for every slide, story and number: does this help the audience believe or act on the message? If not, it goes to the appendix, the handout, or nowhere.

A good core message has three features. It is a full sentence, with a verb. It says something the audience could disagree with, which is how you know it is a claim and not a label. And it is short enough to say in one breath. If yours needs two breaths, it probably holds two messages, and you need to pick one.

The message also depends on who is listening. The same project might have one message for your team, about what changes in their work from Monday, and another for senior management: the project is on budget, and we need a decision on phase two by the end of the month. Before settling your sentence, ask what the audience already knows, what they are worried about and what you want them to do afterwards. The next lesson goes into this in detail.

Two objections come up often. The first is that the subject is too complex for one sentence. Usually that means the speaker has not yet decided what matters most, and the audience will have the same trouble. Complexity still has a home in the talk. It sits in the body, underneath the message, where it supports the sentence you chose. The second is that one sentence feels too thin to fill twenty minutes. In practice the message is what the twenty minutes are for. The structure, examples and evidence you will build in the next modules all exist to make one sentence believable.

Once you have the message, say it early and say it again at the end, in the same words. Repetition that would be clumsy in an email helps listeners, because it tells them which of the many things you said is the one to keep.

Your task: pick a talk or update you will give in the next few weeks. Write its core message as one sentence under 20 words, with a claim someone could disagree with. Then read it to a colleague and ask them to tell you, in their own words, what you are going to argue.

Take a talk or update you have to give soon, write its core message as one sentence under 20 words, and read it to a colleague.

Course

• Presenting and public speaking