BREVITY AND THE SOUNDBITE

When you are media-trained to appear as a television or radio guest “expert”, you are instructed to “keep it short”. In fact the ideal length of a piece of spoken content is about 20 to 25 seconds.This is known as the perfect soundbite.

Why? Well, apparently, somebody has sat down and calculated the span of attention of an average “remote control-wielding” viewer.They concluded that the viewer will stay tuned to a channel, listening to a message for about 25 seconds before they fundamentally need something to change. Unless the image, message, person blabbing or TV show changes, boredom may set in.

So, to meet this evident need, smart players in a media-savvy world need to truncate their words and ideas to adapt to this gold-fish-like attention span.Politicians do it, sharp spokespeople do it and winning leaders seem to have a talent for reducing complex ideas, initiatives and concepts into a succinct 20-second hit.

You have to be brutal with yourself.You have to examine what it is you need to communicate and chop it down with a word-cleaver* so that the absolute bare minimum survives.

* There is no such thing as a ‘word cleaver’

HOWTO CHOP UP YOUR MESSAGE

Let’s take an imaginary news story and look at long rambling version and the attention-grabing soundbite version.

Not getting to the point:

“A small furry black and white cat known to locals and, occasionally some people who live further afield, as ’Alfie’ has, it would appear and despite previous warnings and some degree of training, while wandering freely in a park, which was inadviseable from the start has somehow and inexplicably, taking into consideration the absolute level of chance involved, tumbled into a well.”

This “epic” has taken up way too much of our lives.There are people who can daisy chain a neverending group of flowery, unnecessary sub-clauses together to create the world’s largest sentence, seemingly without ever getting to the actual point.Don’t let this person be you. The above example is extreme – but long drawn out overly ambitious sentences fill people with a sense of entrapment and dread.

Perfect Soundbite:

“Onlookers were shocked to discover that local cat,Alfie fell into a well today - this clearly highlights the dangers of allowing cats too close to wells.”

With minimal fuss and elaboration, this soundbite reaches the point before people have had a chance to mentally switch off. Effective vommunication should quickly get the message across and not fill the maximum time available. (No animals were hurt in the creation of the previous example.)

Tools:

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