How to Communicate Badly: 3 Key Points to Bear in Mind

If you’re going to present yourself to the public there are many ways you can turn your audience off for good.

If this is your intention, you’ll want to read on. Below are six key ways on how to completely miss the mark when it comes to effective communication.

1.Manipulate and Dissemble. Disregard ethos.

The first most important point is to present yourself as untrustworthy. Invent facts that can easily be debunked. After all, your audience will love being taken for fools and feel flattered that you have chosen to manipulate them.

Another excellent way to persuade is to be inauthentic. By creating a fake persona and concealing your true beliefs, you will avoid attracting the right people to your cause — which is definitely what you want to do to create a long-term movement.

To summarise, do all you can to destroy faith in ethos. Aristotle talked a lot about the three rhetorical appeals — logos pathos and ethos — the latter being the trust others have in your good character.

Disregard the importance of ethos = undermine your integrity and arouse suspicion.

2.Preach to the choir. Whatever you do, don’t adjust your speech to your audience.

If you don’t want to persuade others to your viewpoint it’s imperative you keep your tone exactly the same no matter who you’re talking to.

Assume that everyone already agrees with you. Don’t research your audience — and show zero empathy.

For example, if there is an older crowd, make sure that you overwhelm them with passionate rhetoric, the type suitable for a younger group.

Just do the opposite to what your listenership wants and you’ll fail to communicate successfully.

3.Ignore the big picture. Selling a vision isn’t important.

Throughout history, we can see how successful rhetoricians presented a vision to their followers to rally them to their cause.

This is why you should do all you can to play down the big picture and focus on irrelevant details that won’t unite and inspire.

Ignore the lessons we can learn from great statesmen such as Pericles, who delivered his famous Funeral Oration to build up Athens as a city worth fighting and dying for.

A more up-to-date and better-known example would be Martin Luther King’s I have a dream — a utopian vision for a better world.

Yes. If you are looking to call people to action, you should totally disregard the lessons of the greatest speeches of the past and focus on irrelevancies.

Other factors to bear in mind include:

• Never concede a point. Your stubbornness will not prove popular.

Remember to never EVER admit that one of your opponents may be right about something, or show any hint of a conciliatory tone. This will demonstrate you are totally out of touch and unable to relate to the ordinary person, which will turn people off.

• Go all in on facts. Hello logos.

In this era of low attention spans, if you’re looking not to communicate, it’s especially smart to bore people instead of rousing them to action through powerful use of emotive rhetoric.

• Pointlessly attack your opponent. Character assassination for no good reason is especially unattractive.

Going nasty for no good reason is a top way to alienate your audience.

Go into detail and make it lengthy. Just like Cicero’s attack on Marc Antony in 43/44 BC — but do it with less panache.

If you want to go even further, speak ill of the dead. That breaks one of society’s unspoken rules of decency and will turn people away in droves.

To conclude, if you want to lose friends and alienate your audience, be sure to follow the above rules!

You’ll succeed in everyone finding you unreliable, boring, bitter and unpersuasive. Job done.