What do these three things have in common:

High speed internet access
Instant text messaging
Instant paging

The answer is that all three of these mediums deliver large amounts of information in small amounts of time in concise messages. This points to one of the new principals of our society today: We want all the information we need, without a lot of filler, and we want it now. There is no better example of this principal in action than in today’s workplace. It is for this reason that I’ve found the following article by Rix Quinn to be very relevant to today’s business professional. Below is the article, my thoughts follow immediately after:

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“Big Words”: Those multi-syllable and confusing monsters that can ruin any good presentation. This is one of the most frequent pitfalls that professionals at any level fall into. I came across an article by TJ Walker that discusses this problem, and I think he makes a good case for keeping your presentations simple.

Here is the article, I’ll share more of my thoughts in the My Comments at the end:

The Big Word Trap

Many speakers can’t resist the temptation to use big words while giving a speech. Sometimes it is a conscious effort to appear to be smart, sometimes it is an unconscious impulse because that’s what a speaker thinks he or she is supposed to do in a so-called “formal” speech.

Either way, it’s a bad idea.

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