The biggest single failure in communication is lack of planning and thought. You can have the smoothest delivery and most captivating style, a willing audience, and any communication medium you want. All those are fleeting. Eventually, people leave your presence, and they are no longer paying attention to the medium. They finish reading the e-mail or memo or your speech comes to an end. What will stay are ideas and words that speak to them, and those don't come from thin air.

To communicate, you must first know what you want to say and how you want to say it. Before selecting your words, consider what they will need to convey. There will be times that you must communicate in an impromptu situation, which is why you must spend time considering what subjects might come up and how you will approach them. When deciding what to say, you'll need to keep in mind the subject of your message, the structure of how you will say it, and the setting in which you will present it.

Subject

Your subject is the focus of your communication. It's the container that gives shape and context to your words. A subject includes the supporting arguments and evidence you want to present to motivate or convince your audience.

The easiest way to start, particularly for critical writing and speaking, is to jot down your thoughts on the topic in a notebook over a few days. Always keep the notebook with you so that when your subconscious pipes up, you can capture the material. Wait until later and you might as well wait forever; chances are good that you'll lose the train of thought.

Structure

If the subject is the focus of what you are going to communicate, and your audience helps you understand how to express it, structure is the scaffolding that lets everything happen. In well-structured communication, things start naturally and move through a series of points to a conclusion that should seem inevitable by the time you reach it.

Don't go overboard when thinking about structure. Take the points you have written down and arrange them in a natural-sounding progression. Forget about rhetorical flourishes. Just cover what you need to and put down what you want to say as simply as you can.

Setting

The way you express yourself depends on the situation in which the communication takes place. One thing to consider is the nature of the audience and the type of language that it is most likely to be able to hear. A group of engineers might disdain the type of wording that would help motivate a sales team. Choose the wrong vocabulary, and the listening will stop.

The specifics of your communication also depend on the emotional context. Let's say you have two weekly staff meetings. The first covers a performance shortcoming, while the second is about a recent success. The tone of your language will differ significantly from one to the other.