What Are You Actually Trying to Say?

By Sofia Navarro ·

By Sofia Navarro · Finding Your Voice

Someone shares a draft. It is competent, with clear structure, reasonable examples and sensible flow. And it is inert. Nothing is wrong with it and nothing about it matters.

There is one question that reliably locates the problem, and it is uncomfortable enough that people tend to talk around it.

What are you actually trying to say?

Not what is it about. What are you saying.

Topic versus point

  • Topic: "remote onboarding"

  • Point: "remote onboarding fails for a reason nobody budgets for: new people cannot overhear anything"

  • Topic: "our Q3 results"

  • Point: "the number that matters this quarter is that we lost two of our four largest accounts in the same month, whatever revenue did"

The topic tells the audience what territory they are in. The point tells them why they should care and what to do with it. A talk with a topic and no point is a tour.

You can hear the difference in the grammar. A topic is a noun phrase. A point is a full sentence with a verb in it, and usually a claim someone could disagree with. "Customer retention" is a topic. "We are losing customers in the second month, not the first, so the welcome emails are not the problem" is a point. One gives the room something to look at. The other gives them something to decide about.

Why the point goes missing

It feels arrogant. Stating a claim means asserting that you know something. Hedging into topic-language feels more modest. It is also less useful, and audiences do not read hedging as modesty. They read it as having nothing to say.

It is risky. A point can be wrong. A topic cannot. Topic-shaped talks are unfalsifiable, which is comfortable and forgettable.

You have not decided. Most commonly, the speaker has not yet worked out what they think. The talk is a survey of the material because the material has not yet resolved into a view. That is fine as a stage and a problem in a finished draft.

You know too much. The more familiar you are with a subject, the harder it is to remember which parts are obvious and which are the news. Experts often present everything at the same volume because, from the inside, all of it feels important. This is the curse of knowledge at work, and the cure is the same: choose the one thing a newcomer most needs and build around it.

The three-sentence drill

Before writing anything, say these out loud and record yourself:

  1. "The thing I want them to understand is ____."
  2. "Most people currently think ____."
  3. "If this works, on Monday they will ____."

If you cannot complete all three in plain language, you are not ready to write. Skill is rarely the issue. The thinking is unfinished.

Sentence two is the one people skip, and it is load-bearing. If your point is not different from what the audience already believes, there is no talk. Either find the part that is different, or accept that you are giving a briefing and make it short.

A worked example

Here is the drill run on the remote onboarding talk, starting from a first attempt and then a second.

First attempt:

  1. "The thing I want them to understand is how we onboard remote hires."
  2. "Most people currently think it is fine."
  3. "If this works, on Monday they will know more about onboarding."

All three sentences are about the topic. None of them is a claim. That is the signal to stop writing slides and go back to the material.

Second attempt, after asking what actually goes wrong for new starters:

  1. "The thing I want them to understand is that new remote hires learn slowly because they never overhear how decisions get made."
  2. "Most people currently think the problem is documentation."
  3. "If this works, on Monday they will invite each new hire to sit in, silently, on two real meetings a week."

Now the talk has a spine. The examples that support the overhearing idea stay. The thorough tour of the onboarding checklist, which supported nothing, goes. The talk gets shorter and the argument gets easier to follow, because every section is now doing one job.

The elevator version

Second test: explain your talk to someone in twenty seconds and watch their face.

If they say "oh, interesting, why?", you have a point. If they say "right, that makes sense", you have a truism. If they say "so what is the conclusion?", you have a topic.

That last response is the most common, and the most useful. It means the material is fine and the thinking is not finished. Go back to sentence one and answer it plainly.

Where the point goes once you have it

Having a point is half the job. The other half is letting the audience hear it.

Say it early, in nearly the words you used in the drill. A listener cannot scroll back, so a point withheld until the last slide asks them to hold every earlier section without knowing what it is for. There is more on why position matters in primacy, recency and where to put your best point.

Then make every section answer one question: does this help prove the point, or not? Cut the ones that do not, or save them for questions.

Say it again at the end. Not a summary of every section, just the point, once more, plainly. If you structure the talk as the case for a single claim, as described in every talk is secretly an argument, the ending writes itself.

What to do this week

Take the next thing you have to present, even a ten-minute update, and run the three sentences out loud before you open a slide tool. Record it. If you hear a noun phrase where a claim should be, you have found the work.

Then try the twenty-second version on one colleague. Watch which of the three faces you get. The talk will largely write itself once the answer is plain, because a talk is the argument for a point you have already decided you believe.