Speaking With Purpose

If you have opportunity to speak to a group of people and you know about it in time to prepare what you say, I recommend making one point.

If you go hunting with a machine gun, you might kill something. If you go hunting with a rifle, it is more likely that you will kill what you went for.

Ken Davis says in Secrets of Dynamic Communication that if you can’t boil what you want to say down to one sentence, you either don’t know what you want to communicate or you are trying to boil the ocean.

The options Ken suggests you have are to either suggest that the people listening to you “should do something and here’s why,” or that they “can do something, and here’s how.” It works as well for “shouldn’t” or “can’t.”

Put meat on the bones represented by the one sentence by offering testimonies, parables, Scriptures, and pictures. You don’t have to tell them everything you know. Just enough to give evidence that what you are suggesting is true.

If you only make one point, and the people hear it, are convinced of it, and take it home to be changed by it, you have accomplished much more than most “3 points and a poem” speeches happening over pulpits in thousands of sunday meetings in the last 6 weeks.