How can I speak in paragraphs?

February 11, 2021 10:15 AM

I'd like to learn to speak in clear paragraphs, or at least in sentences that have complete syntax and don't end with just a silence or an "hmmmmm". How can I do this?

I once interviewed someone who amazed me by speaking in complete paragraphs of lucid thought. He was a lawyer and public intellectual who was running a government ministry at the time, so I put this down to him just being very intelligent and having complete command of his ideas.

However, a couple of weeks ago I spoke to a personable academic who managed to say very little of any use (or even coherence) during our conversation, but did so in equally beautiful paragraphs. So it seems like this is a skill that's unrelated to the content of what you are saying.

How can I learn to do this? I feel like it would be something that you would need to actually train to do, and is probably easier with a teacher. I imagine that it's closely related to skills in public speaking, although I'm talking about speech that's off-the-cuff, all the time, rather than speech that's prepared or learned in advance.

This is training that I'd be willing to pay for (aside from anything else, I imagine it would be helpful in job interviews, and therefore economically valuable), but I have no idea where to start. (Do I need to speak to a voice or acting coach?)

I'm in the UK, if that makes a difference in these days of remote-everything.

posted by chappell, ambrose to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

I learned through Toastmasters -- specifically, through Table Topics, which are small, off-the-cuff speeches that members give in meetings. I've gotten entirely out of practice in the video conferencing era, unfortunately.

You might find progress through meetings a bit slow if that's the only thing you want to focus on -- you'd only be getting a chance to practice at most once per meeting and in larger clubs not even that often -- but you can look around on the web for lots of resources on asking and answering and evaluating table topics if you want to do some self-study.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:29 AM on February 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

I learned this - enough to be remarked on a couple times in grad school, etc., I’m no Cicero - in high school debate. Lots of practice and immediate feedback, yes? I have known adults who learned at Toastmasters clubs, but I’ve never been.

When it’s firing, I know the outline of the argument-paragraph I’m going to make in a strategic sense. What’s the known I’m starting with, what’s the new thing I’m aiming for, is this a path of gentle but relentless deductive necessity or is there a sudden revelation, reversal, and leap? But I don’t know what the sentences are going to be and I’m sure not thinking any of the above in words. And I don’t always know the sentences I’m going to say until I hear them, which is peculiar.

In debate, we started with very stylized arguments designed around fairly stylized facts, and then learned more shapes of argument, and learned to start with the facts as they were and find the appropriate shape of the argument. Maybe trial lawyers?

Also, I can only do it when I know my material very well, it’s not the same as bloviating. Bloviating is more like cold reading the audience.
posted by clew at 10:35 AM on February 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I know someone who does this. As I understand it, he composes what he's going to say in his head before he says it.
posted by aniola at 10:35 AM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

Well, ADHD really does provide the motor for me, but especially with that condition it became priority to me to develop the habit of identifying what's my point in advance so my natural tendency to get into tangents is served towards a point. When I don't have that clear it's very evident I'm just making word salad to other ppl because they couldn't follow my actual argument because I was still workshopping it verbally. But in the best cases it can feel like a properly executed monologue because all that speech really was building to something.

So practice definitely counts, such as getting into the habit of using bridging words rather than verbal noises, and allowing silence to work as a pause in the flow rather than a complete stop. But familiarity in the subject is also key. I'm very sure the person you spoke to also was very practiced in delivering talking points and pivoting back to his point. And because of their nature of work, they're probably a bit of a generalist in that they'd have a comprehensive knowledge and analysis on a wide variety of topics.
posted by cendawanita at 10:46 AM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think there is a component of public speaking expertise at play, but that's not what I'm going to recommend. Even more than public speaking ability (and a thorough understanding of the topic at hand, but that's not as easy to develop...), what this indicates is an ability to organize thoughts. What I will suggest to you is to spend a lot of time outlining. The ability to outline, especially on the fly, is one of the most valuable skills you can have. If your information is clearly and logically organized, it's easy to then edit the individual sentences or paragraphs for things like word choice or syntactical clarity. On the other hand, if you've got a lot of pretty-sounded sentence fragments in no coherent order, you're no better than magnetic poetry on someone's refrigerator.

So yeah, outline. You'll be surprised how much better ideas sound when they're organized well. I would bet that many of these spoken paragraphs still use verbal tics like "I think", adverbs like "very" or "really", and other such stuff that Strunk and White and all those guys are always advising against, but because it's packaged well, it doesn't strike you as inelegant the way it does on the written page. You can practice by actually writing out an outline until you can do it in your head. Have a friend ask you a question and then start a 30-second timer. Write out your outline in those 30 seconds, and when time's up, answer your friend's question in paragraph form, drawing from your outline.

The other thing I would suggest is mastering transitions, in writing and in speech. You'll notice my above paragraphs are peppered with "even more than..." and "on the other hand..." and such. Read what I wrote aloud, and then read it again without the transition statements, and you'll see the difference immediately. There was an Ask maybe a week or two ago asking about how to get better at transitions, and a lot of good responses there.

As for not ending your statements in awkward silence, perhaps the most useful thing I've learned in all of my language study is the French phrase "n'est-ce pas". It basically translates as "isn't it" (although you can spin it different ways), and appended to the end of your sentence, it turns a simple declarative sentence into a question, which makes for a natural invitation for your interlocutor to speak, don't you think? See what I did there? "Don't you think?", "would you agree?", "isn't it?" (or the English "innit", which I probably enjoy a little too much), even the informal "amirite?!" - they all have the same effect. When you're getting to the end of what you're saying, add a "n'est-ce pas" phrase at the end of your final sentence, and the conversation will flow more smoothly. It also gives your interlocutor a way into what they're going to say. Instead of just answering with an outline of their own, they can ease into their answer by saying "yeah, you know, I do agree...".

---

Alternatively, there's a chance this is just an innate difference. I was reading Ulysses as part of a book club a few years ago, and I mentioned that, while the writing is supposed to be stream-of-consciousness, it just sounds like a bunch of incomplete thoughts strung together a lot of the time. One of the other people in the book club, one of the smartest and most articulate people I know, challenged me on the point, because Joyce's writing reminded him of his own interior monologue. I countered that my own interior monologue speaks in complete sentences, which everyone else in the club found surprising. Thinking in complete sentences doesn't seem to be all that common, but there's nothing I did to teach myself how to do it. It's just how my mind works. That's not a helpful answer, I know. I think the first part of my answer will be more helpful to you, though, don't you?
posted by kevinbelt at 11:00 AM on February 11, 2021 [9 favorites]

Within my organization, we have a small but prominent department that is (for lack of a better way of describing it) focused on specialized communication. At the simplest level, this department oversees our media presence (in terms of ensuring that content is delivered in a style and format fitting for its context, e.g. is this an interview with a journalist, a broad public speaking engagement, a scientific panel discussion, etc.). The fundamental unit of education here is "media training," which is a kind of training you can certainly find for yourself via consultants, courses, and the like. Media training itself can be very banal, or even unhelpful (in that some media training is attuned to evading unhelpful or undesired questions), but it can get quite sophisticated. There are all sorts of consultants out there who specialize in professional communication or science communication or translating complex data for lay audiences or... you get the idea. Finding someone to help you learn doesn't mean you need to go in any particular direction (especially if you're already interviewing people), it's just a matter of choosing a path for more training and sticking with it.

To give an example, the two senior-level staff in this department work very differently. One of them is on television all the time, quoted in articles, writing opinion pieces, testifying before government bodies, and so on. The other is never on the public stage, but is up to speed on current science and theory around communication and information, with an added benefit of being a downright empathic coach of recognizing one's own strengths, weaknesses, calmness, and anxiety when put on the spot. The reason I say that there's no real worry about what specific kind of education and training you seek in this are is because, for both of these senior staff, the answer to your question boils down to these basic parts:

1. Compose your thoughts in advance.
2. Read them aloud, then edit them.
3. Repeat 1. and 2. to refine your delivery and clarify your thinking.
4. Make time to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

As you follow this process on any given subject through enough iterations, you'll find that it is a skill that extends its benefits to every other area in which you might need to communicate your ideas clearly. It's like exercising a muscle that's trained to distill information into comprehensible packets.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:20 AM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think some of this is about having snippets prepared - like, I used to be a presenter at a museum. I would speak "off the cuff" about topics to complete strangers. But I had a lot of go-to topics. I was often stringing them together in different ways (I wasn't reciting things like a robot) but I definitely had an idea of the kind of thing I needed to say. It's much easier to speak fluently and extemporaneously when you know your subject.

On the other hand training yourself out of saying "hmmm," etc., is mostly just about practice, I think. Play the "Um Game" by yourself or with a friend - you set a topic and then you see how long you can keep talking about it without saying "um" (or "like" or "ah" or whatever your particular trouble words are) or taking a long pause. Start out with an easy topic like "dogs" and when that gets too easy (i.e. you can go for five minutes) switch it up to something more difficult (it's honestly quite fun when you know literally nothing about the topic - "small mammals of Central Asia," "French philosophy before Descartes," etc.).
posted by mskyle at 12:00 PM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

So I'm sort of surprised only one person said Toastmasters, because Toastmasters. Toastmasters is kinda hokey and is it great going to a weekly meeting with a bunch of strangers? Not really. But this is the kind of skill you develop with practice and Toastmasters is a great way to do that. How do you get to Carnagie Hall, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 12:40 PM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’ll gladly endorse Toastmasters. Not only will they keep track ON PAPER of each of your uhhhs, ummms, or errrs, they’ll point out to you exactly where in the speech you said it.
If you’re one of those benighted folks who begin a sentence with “So,....” Toastmasters will (lovingly and gently) hang you from the highest yardarm until you break that heinous habit.
posted by BostonTerrier at 1:03 PM on February 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’m a professional talker, and I got good at it by talking a lot. I talk on the phone, I practice improvising paragraphs to sort out my thoughts, I have a running narrative at many points in my day.

I’ve also had jobs where I had to do endless public speaking (teaching, demonstrating products, tour guide, host, film festival lineup wrangler) so I’ve had a lot of feedback from seeing people glaze over or wander away if I become boring.

When I have to speak about something that requires more polish, I often write out exactly what I’m gonna say ahead of time, using carefully chosen vocabulary, and read it out loud a few times privately. Then, when I have to say it in a more pressured setting, I don’t try to recite exactly what I wrote (because memorized text sounds stiff) - I still improvise to the chosen key points - but I do find it easier to use more elegant phrasings and longer sentences because I planned and rehearsed them.

Also, before a high pressure talking situation (like if I’m doing an interview), I call a charming friend and have an animated chat while getting ready, just to warm up my social skills for the day and get into a verbal mindset.

I would say it all comes down to practice!

Record yourself and watch / listen back, too - and do that often enough that you get over feeling self-conscious about the way you look or sound, and you can actually focus on and analyze what you’re saying and how you’re expressing it, so you can improve.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:15 PM on February 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

I am a professor who teaches public speaking and I will say MOST of what we teach is exactly this: how to organize information that will be presented verbally. Very little of "Intro to Public Speaking" is like, how to project your voice and enunciate. So to that end I'd recommend a public speaking course online or at a community college /extension school (Matt McGarrity's course on Coursera, for example, is super).

But it's really just the old chestnut-- if you want to speak in paragraphs, you'll need to "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them." In practice this often looks like making a point, giving an example, then reiterating your point: "You know, I think that access to water is the most important issue facing the world today. Just look at the migration to the U.S. from central America-- this is the result of 20 years of drought. Drought causes climate migration, the full effects of which we're just beginning to see. A lot of other geopolitical issues around migration and crisis: they're really about water. "

Off the top of my head but you get the idea.
posted by athirstforsalt at 9:18 PM on February 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

If you learn how to do this - just be sure that you can turn it off again when it's not helpful.

Like clew and kevinbelt said above, some people's thoughts seem to organise themselves into complete sentences. I'm another one for whom that's true. I haven't always found it helpful in social settings, if I'm honest - some people are visibly intimidated when they hear those sentences drop out, one after the other, complete with subordinate clauses and punctuation. I think it doesn't always sound, to other people, like it's genuine & spontaneous discourse. But, for better or worse, I can't turn it off. If you learn to turn it on, remember where the off switch is.
posted by rd45 at 3:31 AM on February 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

I routinely speak this way and always have. I think it's because, since early childhood, I was voracious reader and likely acquired most of my language skills this way. It just seems like the normal mode of speech to me. I will suggest then, to be a good speaker, you must first be a good reader. Find works that read they way you would want to speak, perhaps read them aloud, and you may find their organization and cadence enters your own speech.*

*Caution: I went through a period of being engrossed in the works of PG Wodehouse and for at least a month I sounded like Bertie Wooster. So, exercise care.
posted by SPrintF at 12:15 PM on February 12, 2021