> How do you get the ability to do this? I've been attending a book club with a small number of friends and even in these casual settings I wish I could communicate my ideas better.
It's hard. And it depends on the people. With the most logical people, it's easiest for me, I just slow myself down and break down my argument into small pieces. Like in the book club, you may be tempted to say "I think the author's secret message is X" and people go "huh?" But if I go - "there's a line that says A.. do y'all remember this line?" - they say "yes" - "well, this line jumped out at me as weird, because of B. Do y'all agree that it's an unusual way to say it?" - "yup" - "so I was thinking, why is this weird to me, and I realized the only way B would be true is if C were true. Does that make sense to you guys" - "yup" - "ok, so if the author is saying C is true, I wonder if he is saying it to teach us X. Does that seem crazy?" "nope that makes sense"
Basically, you walk people from A to B to C and then the leap to X is clean and people can follow the whole chain. If you just say "it's X" they go "huh?"
The reason this is hard is because you yourself may not know why you decided X, and others may not reach that conclusion for a ton of different reasons. So forcing yourself to articulate your own logic to yourself is step 1, walking others through it is step 2.
A related thing is - in my experience, you can NEVER over-communicate. Like, it's tempting for me to skip A,B,C because I read them, I assume others read them and must have interpreted the same thing, so it feels condescending to start there, but in reality it's never a problem - people either say "yup, it's great to know we're seeing the same thing" or very often "actually, we missed that."
I hope this helps. That's just one type of scenario. All this gets harder when emotions or egos are involved, so dealing with that is hard.
Actually one more tip - the art of TLDR - people often make their point in a rambling way, surfacing a bunch of stuff that is confusing. More is not always better, but to be able to synthesize it all into a digestible narrative is really important if you want people to get it.
It's hard. And it depends on the people. With the most logical people, it's easiest for me, I just slow myself down and break down my argument into small pieces. Like in the book club, you may be tempted to say "I think the author's secret message is X" and people go "huh?" But if I go - "there's a line that says A.. do y'all remember this line?" - they say "yes" - "well, this line jumped out at me as weird, because of B. Do y'all agree that it's an unusual way to say it?" - "yup" - "so I was thinking, why is this weird to me, and I realized the only way B would be true is if C were true. Does that make sense to you guys" - "yup" - "ok, so if the author is saying C is true, I wonder if he is saying it to teach us X. Does that seem crazy?" "nope that makes sense"
Basically, you walk people from A to B to C and then the leap to X is clean and people can follow the whole chain. If you just say "it's X" they go "huh?"
The reason this is hard is because you yourself may not know why you decided X, and others may not reach that conclusion for a ton of different reasons. So forcing yourself to articulate your own logic to yourself is step 1, walking others through it is step 2.
A related thing is - in my experience, you can NEVER over-communicate. Like, it's tempting for me to skip A,B,C because I read them, I assume others read them and must have interpreted the same thing, so it feels condescending to start there, but in reality it's never a problem - people either say "yup, it's great to know we're seeing the same thing" or very often "actually, we missed that."
I hope this helps. That's just one type of scenario. All this gets harder when emotions or egos are involved, so dealing with that is hard.
Actually one more tip - the art of TLDR - people often make their point in a rambling way, surfacing a bunch of stuff that is confusing. More is not always better, but to be able to synthesize it all into a digestible narrative is really important if you want people to get it.