Stick To the Point When Making Your Point

How not to evade the issue, avoid the question, generally wander around pointlessly.

If you have ever asked yourself why you should stick to the point, or maybe you have trouble sticking to the point or ponder upon "how can I stick to the point" then this article may be for you.

In conversations, emails, sales pitches, essays - in fact all forms of communication - it is often necessary to make your point with reasonable clarity.

You may want to get an important message across to the receiver, or be sure that they understand exactly what you are trying to say.

Time is short sometimes, or you may be paying someone to listen to your point, such as a lawyer or doctor - so it is essential to sort out what you are planning to say or write and say it.

Or write it.

First of all, it’s essential to consider what point you want to be making.

Without a real purpose your text is going to meander meaninglessly and it’s almost impossible to reach a conclusion.

By the time you come to the end the chances are high that your unfortunate reader or listener has long since wandered off, and you have missed the chance to either sell some product or get your point across.

This is why I have a golden rule for keeping on track.

It’s called the title - and if I find myself wandering I will glance back up to check that I have remained within a couple of blocks of the issue at hand. By blocks I mean paragraphs or chunks of text as I suppose we should now call them.

But the visual appeal of someone wandering physically rather than mentally suited my purpose.

In spoken communication you can think of the title as the subject of the matter which you want to discuss.

I have a serious issue with staying solely on the Point.

This is partly due to a low boredom threshold and mostly due to a lack of knowledge about the subject matter pertaining to the point.

Research is not one of my strengths whereas wandering around aimlessly is.

In some ways I consider it an achievement if I can invite a reader in and then take them for a brief stroll unaccompanied by any real points at all.

As long as they leave at the end with a rousing hurrah of the original point then we can part on reasonable terms, and they will have forgotten the bit in the middle by then anyway.

The beauty of the internet is that I have no idea whether this works, as I can’t actually tell how many of these intermediate words have been read, skimmed or otherwise ignored. So I can live in fairly happy ignorance, in the belief that my output has been digested fully and of great use to the wider community.

I call it free writing whereas my teachers would call it missing the point and give me a double detention.

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You see, we can try to start off well, with a cracking title and a few opening lines that promise a great deal about the important topic.

It is necessary that this is sufficient to give visitors the possibly vain hope, but a hope anyway, that herein lays the truth for which they are searching.

This expectation could be enough to delight someone at first glance, due to the continual disappointment of the usual layers of spam and garbage that flood the internet. Once they are in a few lines it may be enough to keep them on for a while.

As I said earlier, I don’t know if this is the case.

However, I can’t do anything else so this is how I make my point.

Er.

At this stage I now need to recheck the title to remember what the hell I am supposed to be writing about.

Ah yes, sticking to the point. Well we are reasonably on topic still I think, so that’s a big thumbs up to me so far.

This bit was about the difficulties, let’s make the next bit about the benefits and then we’re bowling along nicely.

You’ve mastered the search engines, for once, and a visitor has found you.

They do this by typing in something like “Sticking to the Point” and they want to read all about it. You need to consider what they might be looking for and try your best to provide it.

Some of them will have spent the last two hours searching for the topic and be so worn out that a diversion of sorts is welcome. But others will have found you first (I jest of course in my case, I normally hover around the twentieth page) and they will want the point of your page immediately or they’re off.

So, unless you want to risk losing a customer, you need to try to provide that which they are looking for. And keep on that subject until they are satisfied, bored or just ready to move on.

Personally, with the exception of writing rant pieces, I find it a little tedious to just parrot something that I have just found in Wiki or a product I am trying to sell. This is why I am.. how might you say.. lacking slightly.. OK, I’m a failure.

But from the benefit of being a failure I am of course well placed to tell you how to do it.

What is it?

Do what I say, not what I do - is the expression I am going to clutch to.

Oh boy do they. At least I guess they do by the number of pages I read that seem to say the exact same thing fifty times but the words in a slightly different order.

I have tried it myself in this piece with a number of mentions of getting the point across, and so on – but I got bored with that.

However, if you want to keep the search engines or internet police happy then stay on target. Otherwise the poor old Adsense engine and poor old Google don’t have the first idea of what you are on about.

For myself, I consider a personal challenge to write something that a dumb computer hasn't got the first idea about - it's rebelling - but in a completely nerdy and arguably pointless way.

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At the end it’s good to have a quick summary of the point, what you’ve learned or more accurately, typed, and the benefit to the reader of having er read it.

There is definitely no point in leaving them with some sort of funny story or other diversion which will mean they have forgotten the entire Point of the page immediately after reading it.

As I don’t have any hilarious diversions to offer there is no danger of that happening here.

You might well ask what was the point of this page, and if I were to be honest I would say probably very little. However, as a self proclaimed internet expert I won’t actually say that, I will try to finish on a high note.

I hope my small offering (good to be humble, get them on your side even when you don't mean it) was of some use to you. It’s very important on the web to make your point succinctly (always throw in a long word, it makes the less intelligent reader think you have half an idea) and quickly without wandering round the houses.

If you find the right topic, stick to it and sell it in a straightforward way to your readers then you have a chance of being as successful as myself.

Note: Success is a relative term. I use it quite a lot.

As do my relatives. Mainly prefaced by the words - lack of.