Why is no one listening?

Are you frustrated that the fascinating story about your work is not being heard? You’re telling it, but the world just isn’t listening. Maybe it’s because academic ways of communicating are often the exact opposite of what you need to command serious attention.

The message is the outcome, the destination, not the journey. How to slow Alzheimer’s disease, for example. A way to break the cycle of flunking school. Where Richard III was buried. That’s what gets clicks and eyeballs.

Here are four of the biggest issues, along with simple solutions to help your communication cut through. 

1. Be clear about the value in your content

How many emails, reports, submissions, applications, memos and social media posts do you see in a day? Yep, the thought made me grimace, too.

Given the competition for attention, your content has to be irresistible. This means you must put the value – the reason anyone should pay attention to your message – right up front in any communication you create about it.

Compare these two ways to start an article about engaging teaching, for example:

A: I’ve noticed that many lecturers struggle to engage an audience, talking away while the group play with their phones or stare out the window in vacant desperation. But it doesn’t have to be that way, because there are tricks you can use to make sure you command attention.

B: If you’re fed up with audiences zoning out when you’re lecturing, this is how to ensure attention.

Which is the more captivating?

I hope your answer is version B. And why? Because it offers the value right up front, hooking the attention of the reader.

2. Be incisive, not academic

Academia, if you’ll excuse my observation thus, is somewhat predisposed to lengthy words, and that is before we even get to the rich array of caveats so often presented in a discourse, not to mention, naturally, a penchant for a protracted form of lexemes and morphemes, and, last but not least, even more elongated passages of prose.

This style may be OK for an academic journal, but if you want to be heard, read or watched by a much wider audience, it’s hopeless. 

The pace of modern life means attention spans are short. Scarily brief. TikTok brief, in fact. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found the average to be about 47 seconds. People rarely have the focus to wade through paragraphs that resemble crossword clues. 

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So, for mass communication, you need to write and speak incisively, not academically. This is true whether we’re thinking media appearances, talks to everyday audiences or social media. No jargon, science speak or scholastic locutions and vocables. Short words rather than long. 

Use concise sentences – as opposed to those that sprawl like an unchecked city – when you’re writing. Even fragments are fine. As long as they make sense. Brief paragraphs, punctuated by white space. Conversational, rather than formal, for both written and spoken communication.

That all adds pace, interest and edge to your content. It’s such an easy win, too.

Never forget, however much it might go against years of preconception and practice, that when it comes to mass communication, simple isn’t stupid. Simple is smart.

3. Start with the outcome

I know it’s traditional academic practice to introduce your topic, discuss the context, move on to your hypothesis, outline your methods, gather your data, plod through an analysis, then finally draw your conclusions. But which part will the public notice, care about and remember?

Try a trick of the media trade. Arrange your content in an inverted pyramid of importance. For example, thinking in social media terms, here’s a  standard format that I could have used for a recent post:

Have a look at my new vlog. It deals with three common problems people suffer when public speaking. I have a trick which is so simple, yet so effective for helping. Do you want to ease your nerves and enhance your authority, plus cut out those annoying and undermining ums and ers when presenting?

Yawn, boring, what a dull start. Any reader could be forgiven for giving up right there and moving on to the next post if the content starts that way. And the important point would be lost. 

But how much more effective is the message if you reverse the order of those sentences? 

4. Brevity  

A common abbreviation is well worth remembering: TL;DR.

If you’re unfamiliar, it stands for: Too long; didn’t read. 

The shorter your message, the more likely it is to be read or heard.

Cut out redundant words. Say what you need to and stop. You’ll be far more engaging that way.

For example, return to my monster of a paragraph at the start of point two, on being incisive. How much more readable is it if expressed this way: Academia is full of long words, caveats and even longer sentences.

We’ve gone from 57 words to 11. Which is where my favourite saying in the communication trade comes in: less is more. 

Less work for more impact. What’s not to like? And if you doubt that a brief message can be powerful, remember the great American president Abraham Lincoln. His Gettysburg address was 270 words. Yes, just about half a page of A4. It’s cited as a masterpiece of communication still today, more than 160 years on. That’s less is more in glorious effect.

Finally, look back at this article and tick off the tricks I’ve mentioned. They worked, didn’t they? Because they’ve kept you reading until the end.

Simon Hall is course leader of Compelling Communication Skills at the University of Cambridge Online and a senior research associate in the Intellectual Forum at Jesus College, Cambridge. His latest book is Compelling Communication (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 

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