You all know I read Seth Godin's blog about marketing concepts and execution. Today he added a quick entry exhorting writers of advertising and marketing materials to eliminate "weasel words" from their copy. I offer the same advice in my speaker training to online presenters. You take a huge amount of power away from your message when you add qualifiers such as "kind of", "sort of", "a little like" and so on. George Bush said "Read my lips. No new taxes." It was a remarkably successful sound bite and clearly encapsulated a clear, powerful message. We can leave it to historians and analysts to gauge the followthrough and accuracy of execution. That's not my job. I'll just point out that George didn't say "Read my lips. There will pretty much be no completely new, what you might call taxes."
Figure out the message you want to convey. Develop the evidentiary points that support your message. Then deliver them in concise and unambiguous terms. Kruschev did not get global coverage for his incendiary statement: "We will sort of bury you, after a fashion!"
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