I watch a little basketball, just enough to keep myself up-to-date on team standings and injuries. Yet, because my children have been involved in many sports, I have learned the basics about most. This serves well in business in America where the week often starts with a meeting around the ‘water cooler’.
We recall that the NBA /“N – B – A”/ (National Basketball Association) had a “Lockout” (owners began a work stoppage when players and owners couldn’t agree on a contract) from July 1st to December 8th, 2011.
Apparently this allowed a little known player to emerge into the spotlight out of the “D” Leagues /”Leegs”/ (NBA Development League). Jeremy Lin is a new recruit to the New York Knicks and the first American player of Chinese descent to play in the NBA.
Jeremy is excelling as a point guard and he excels at ‘assists’: 89 points total in his first three games with the New York Knicks.
According to CBS (C – B – S), the Harvard Economics graduate (gra-ju-eht) “scorched Kobe (Ko-bee) Bryant (Bri-ant) and the Lakers” last Friday”, February 10th.
Did Jeremy have an athletic scholarship to Harvard? No. Did he receive any athletic scholarships for any college? No. Yet, at Harvard he had the opportunity to play for an I-vy League /Leeg/ school and maintain a 3.01 Average in economics.
Not only does he understand discipline and perseverance, he is very well educated, knowledgeable and has an eye for fast moving opportunities.
How about you? Have you noticed opportunities to improve your pronunciation and knowledge of sports in this post?
Now, go talk about Jeremy Lin and the New York Knicks with folks who speak Standard English as a first language. Perseverance works.
Jeremy Lin career-high 38pts vs. Lakers || 2.10.12 || HD
www.youtube.com Jeremy Lin Career-high 38pts vs Lakers
Common with today’s forms of communication the communications that we send and receive are often in short bursts: 140 characters for Twitter, 128 characters for Windows Live Messenger and 100 characters for LinkedIn updates and the newly implemented 420 characters on Facebook (from 160). Characters, not words!
Our listeners and readers are overloaded with information. They expect to be given short, pointed and strategic information. This means we must strategically prepare what we are planning to say.
Linguists indicate that the average English sentence is between 2.3 words (“Valley Girl” study) and 14.3 words (average adult). Doing the math, that’s an average of 8 words per sentence.
On Twitter, at about 4.5 characters per word (+ 1 space per word), you’d be allowed about 3 sentences. On LinkedIn, it would be two. Not easy. Try it!
Spoken Messages
An Elevator Speech – A strategic message – is usually one minute.
Most listeners readily understand us when we speak at an average of 125 words per minute. When we go faster or have an accent, our listeners must either screen out parts of the message or struggle to understand. That means that we have few than 10 short sentences, including pauses, to get our message across.
The basic format follows the Toastmasters International tenet of:
“Tell them what you are going to tell them”: two sentences.
“Tell them”: four to five sentences
“Tell them what you told them”: two to three sentences
“Tell them what action you want: the ‘call to action’: two sentences.
If we craft what we say before we say it and keep it within a select number of words and minutes, we will be better received and understood by our listeners.
We’ll be much more likely to get what we want when we use the K.I.S.S. method.
Example: This is the Winning Pitch at the MIT Global Start-Up Workshop:
For more help with developing your elevator speech skills, contact your local Toastmasters, International club. www.toastmasters.org. For those who want help with speaking better Business English and presentation skills, contact me at www.AccentManagementGroup.com
Speaking in American Standard English is a fluid process. Sounds from one word merge into the next word until we have, at times, what sounds like one long word. This is called “linking”.
You have heard this on TV and in daily interactions.
In a TED Talk by Simon Sinek on “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” the first sentence is linked to sound like:“How’deh’you-weksplain whenthingz-don/go-azwee-a’sume…or\bedder….”
Mr. Sinek merges “How do you” as /How’deh’you/. He does maintain a professional speaking style keeping clarity of appropriate vowel production with a clear /u/ in “you” instead of saying /How’deh’yah/ .
A common practice that can be heard in an example TED Talk is changing the pronunciation of a two-syllable word with a medial voiceless consonant so that the final syllable is distressed as in ‘or better’ being pronounced as “..or\bedder”. In other words, the motor speech system often hunts for “efficiency” of movement.
This is true in all sound systems, even when one “speaks the Kings English”. Listen to Sir Ken Robinson, who speaks a very crisp King’s English, as he says “Why wu’ju lower them….” When giving his RSA Animate speech.
To learn about having more success speaking and presenting in Business English, contact Phyllis at p.thesier@AccentMgtGroup.com
