The goal of a communicator is to translate. You take subject matter and transfer it to another human being.  That individual should understand your message and then be able to digest the essence of it, and send it on to another person.  If not, you’ve failed.

When I speak with others about what I do, I often say, “I’m a translator.” Think of it this way:  You get a problem sent to you in scientific-speak.  If you send it on in the same format, only those who recognize and understand science-speak will absorb your message. That means you must translate.

Readers need to get what you say.  When I worked for the U.S. Department of Energy, I remember a high ranking woman coming to me for help with a memo.  She was sending a message to the field loaded with redundancies, acronyms and big words that obfuscated her message.  No one would understand it.  My head swam reading it.

To her credit, she knew it was bad.  She just didn’t know how to fix it.  I took the three-page meandering gook and condensed it to one page of three core paragraphs.  I gave her declarative message, stated why the change needed to be made, then reinforced it in the third paragraph.  End of translation.

When I brought the changes to her, she read it quickly looked at me with a stunned expression, and said, “How did you do this?”  Her question warmed my heart because it showed how important (and often devalued) superior communication is.  I responded, “It’s my job.  I’m a translator.”  And a condenser, a simplifier and a sense-maker.

But most importantly as a communicator, you want to be a translator, taking more complex material and simplifying it so others understand.  Keep that in mind when you write, and your transmissions will gain a greater readership.

We’re all busy.  If you write in a business environment, you send and respond to emails, put together reports or memos, and contribute your words to a multitude of other projects.  You type away on your desktop, laptop of smart phone.  But do you wait after you’ve written something, take a minute to recalibrate and then reread what you wrote before hitting that “send” button?  Probably not.

I’m as guilty as the next person, repeatedly finding typos and grammar errors in emails I’ve sent, even draft press releases or statements written for the company president.  Was I embarrassed?  Yes.

One year in my annual review, my boss at the time had recently been let go, and the president gave me feedback instead.  His sole comment was that I had a typo on a press release we’d sent out.  Yikes!  I was a one-man band, so there wasn’t a true review process, but that still didn’t excuse the error, which in a public way made the company look less professional.

Checking your copy before you send it (wherever that may be) is one of the most important things you can do in a professional environment.  Reread it.  Take an extra minute.  Think about exactly what you want to say.  How did you sound? 

Better than you checking, hopefully you have someone in your chain-of-command who can eyeball your work if you send materials that are public-facing.  If not, it’s even more important that you focus intently on giving your copy an extra read.

We’ve all gotten the text or email with words omitted, transposed or redundantly inserted.  When that happens, you don’t look good, nor does your company.  Check your copy.  You’ll be glad you did. 

Sometimes you have to wonder what world people live in. Last week, a colleague related a story to me about a killer PowerPoint at his place of business. Because it took so long, he counted the number of slides the presenter used. Grab a seat. You might fall over when you hear this.

There were 72 slides in the deck. Seventy-two. It’s hard to believe ANYONE stayed awake in that session, no matter how scintillating the information was.

The point in relating this story is to remember your audience and time constraints when you write a PowerPoint. No one wants to sit through 40 slides. Thirty is getting past the normal person’s attention span. Twenty is probably as far as you should go. Ten gets you in and out with time for questions and people might even pay attention.

Did anyone get the message from the 72-page PowerPoint? Of course not. All people were thinking was, “What’s for lunch?” Or, “When is he going to finish this !@#$%^&*()_+_)(*&^%$#@! presentation?” It would have been funny if the 72-page presenter held a quiz afterwards to see what his audience had absorbed. Frankly, that’s probably a good idea because it would give immediate feedback that he needed to jettison 42-pages in his presentation and concentrate on three core takeaways.

Next time you get assigned a PowerPoint, keep in mind what you want the audience to walk away with. Do you want them to take an action? Should they be well-informed on three critical initiatives? Should they have a better sense of how their job fits into the direction of the business?

We can’t learn everything in a day. Sadly, some speakers think that’s what they should do when they speak in front of you, droning on with data, statistics and useless diagrams. Limit the message and engage the audience. That’s the way to go.