Get to the Point

I prove here how difficult it is for people to get to the point even when they are showing us or teaching us how to GET TO THE POINT.   If we get to the point then what follows is of no consequence because we already know.  Yet surely we do not be because there is an endless tome of thinkers who have written about "getting to the point".

At Toastmasters "Get to the Point" is the subject of the third speech project.  So this being written as a member of a private member Toastmasters club, let me begin with Toastmasters and here I find a view from Andrew Dlugan, who is also into learning these kind of things :

#01: Toastmasters Speech 3: Get to the Point                                                                         http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/toastmasters-speech-3-get-to-the-point/

If we are not satisfied with what Andrew says then we can go to the top of the entrepreneurial tree where we find Richard Branson and here Virgin neatly provide a quote from their fearless leader and not just to get to the point, but get to the point fast.

#02: Get to the Point Fast                                                                                                          https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/get-to-the-point-fast

Branson is not someone who I think of someone who gets to the point fast - because he always has SO MUCH to say.  His thrill-seeker ADHD like persona does not jive with the crafted soundbite comment, his escapades do not line up with the brevity of his quote.  What this link does show is how we as a society can confuse "get to the point" with a minefield of "quotations".  Virgin knows that quotes is what many of us absolutely consume.

We also consume a feast of diagrams and models of process that are meant to explain things and "get to the point".  Even in a simple view as "Get to the Point" we can be given an endless supply of communication models, like the very kind that Abbie Lundberg has produced here :

#03: Effective Communication - GTTP by Abbie Lundberg                                           http://lundbergmedia.com/blog/2010-09-16-effective-communication-how-to-get-to-the-point 

Here Abbie provides a model including encoding and decoding. 

Geoffrey James in his Inc. article begins to touch on why we should get to the point and his is more humbling point, which is that we may not actually have that much interesting to say!  So here I can only explain that in terms of what I call the "School of Perpetual Boredom" - for do we want to get to the point because we are bored folk simply looking for the next shot of attention that we get alert to?  Has "GTTP" become an accepted daily consumption we don't think about.

#04: Rule #1 - GTTP by Geoffrey                                                                                                       http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/rule-no-1-get-to-the-point.html

The interesting thing is that if someone told us to GTTP F2F, we may not be as gracious to them as we may feel when we read about someone else not getting to the point.  So by now surely we know what "Get to the Point" means by now - but no, hold on, according to Fast Company there is actually far greater mastery to this, or at least from what I learned from an interview with Josh McCormack.  This "Getting to the Point" stuff is now expanding in depth and dimension.

#05: Mastering the Fine Points of Getting to the Point by Lidia Dishman                               http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/rule-no-1-get-to-the-point.html

Now we are really cooking because in Dishman's interview what GTTP comes down to is a whole lot of things in our own behaviours that get in the way of this.  Now it becomes a little more apparent why people in a Toastmasters group can spend years learning how to do this, what on the surface seems like a simple action of getting to the point.  Having come to know a plethora of things about GTTP, and Dan Kim shows us that there is even more :

#06 GTTP by Dan  Kim                                                                                                                                    https://m.signalvnoise.com/get-to-the-point-423cd6dfef9d#.uj0v1cnuq

Now having seen what Kim has had to say about "long windups"  will I be able to note my own "long windups" here and learn anything from it?  Do I actually suffer from a perpetual antithesis to GTTP?  This would seem like a good place to stop, but then there is whole canopy of new things in the world of presentations. Nancy Duarte has made a business out of helping people with presentations and her group and such is the artistic purpose of that, her group can bring this message to the level of creative humour and it looks more like GTTP in this video :

#07: Duarte.com/edy Vignette #1: Get to the Point                                             http://www.duarte.com/blog/duarte-comedy-vignette-1-get-to-the-point/

#08: The Four Sentence Email https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249448

We, however should get back to the Duarte group, unless we thought that they were succinct and to the point but as this HBR article will attest, this not as simple as it appears on the video :

#09: When Presenting Your Data - Get to the Point - Fast                                                               https://hbr.org/2013/03/when-presenting-your-data-get

And at the end of this GET TO THE POINT sojourn, I end with the view of academic writers who are always more apt to quote from William and Strunk. 

#10: Get to the Point: Writing Succinctly by Stephanie Castillo                               http://www.walkersands.com/Blog/get-to-the-point-writing-succinctly/

I like the way Stephanie began with the William Strunk Jr. quote " Vigorous writing is concise." but that Strunk quote was way actually longer than that.  When it comes to writing for the masses it clearly is GET TO THE POINT because we want to focus on certain things, people or short-term opportunities, but when it comes to the elite the word is not "Get to the Point" but "Writing Succinctly".  Not that I am succint or ever pretended to be but perhaps that is what should have been the title of this buzz - the Art of Succinct or better "Successful Succinctness".

If 10 links are not enough then at least we can settle on one quote :

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter

Credited to many - which is actually quite ironic

But alas there is an entire history now attached to even this pithy looking quote. 

#11: Examination of the Quote                                                                                http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Now did I digress. Actually not.  I wanted to Get to the Point about setting it to 11 because the point is and has always been that 11 is louder than 10.