Comment on SotW: Be Specific

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 21:02:35 GMT

Perhaps the better advice would be "be AWARE of how specific you are being, and in which direction you should move to facilitate communication" - sometimes you're giving a bunch of overly-specific examples without tying them together, and sometimes you're being overly general without giving someone some concrete examples to test their understanding.

My roommate and I often sit on the couch and discuss ideas for our shared D&D campaign. We exercise this skill a lot - two very common questions are: "can you give me some specific examples?" [be more specific] and "I don't get what ties these examples together" [what's the big picture / be more general]

Possibly an exercise that involves going through a quick dialog, and the audience calling out "be more specific" / "what's the big picture?" as appropriate at each step (or holding up colored flags, etc.). Another very simple exercise here, but it helps the audience calibrate to the idea, engages them a bit.

I don't think breaking people in to pair would be beneficial for this, unless you want to focus on "seeing where you are on the ladder, and WHICH direction you need to move." You seem to want to focus just on "moving down, being more specific", which seems fine to me. This just helps them to see the ladder itself, and realize that it moves BOTH ways.

You can then transition by saying "Okay, now we're going to focus specifically on techniques for moving DOWN the ladder, for being more SPECIFIC..."

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