At work, a large part of my day is taken up by speaking. I spend a significant amount of time in meetings of some sort, both where other people are primarily talking and also where I have to talk most of the time. Because I started noticing that many of these hundreds of thousands of words were being applied less effectively than they could have, I began trying to derive some rules of thumb for effective verbal communication. These rules of course do not apply to your run-of-the-mill pleasant social conversation, and they shouldn’t. They’re there for meetings and for advising people. Here we go:
