What the best communicators understand about their audience

Michael Amenta
Nov 18, 2025
6 min read

Most people treat communication as a performance, but the most effective communicators design it to connect.

Why do smart, prepared people fail to move the people in front of them?

It's easy to forget a listener or audience is doing two things at once: trying to understand what you're saying, and deciding whether it's worth their attention. Most communicators make both jobs difficult with too many ideas, too many words, and too little consideration for what the recipients need to understand their insight.

You don't have to be more eloquent or charismatic. Effective communication starts with an empathic connection to your audience, not performance.

One idea only

This connection can be easily lost through complexity. Every idea competes for attention with your core message. One idea per communication solves this problem and avoids the common tendency to "bury the lead".

If you can't draft a single sentence, or 'TL;DR', that captures the point of your communication, you haven't yet found your core idea. Get that sentence right first. That discipline applies most strictly to spoken remarks and short-form writing. A longer guide carries one central thesis, with sections that must serve as supporting evidence rather than noise.

Your one idea also needs to adapt to be the right fit for each specific audience. Ask: what does this particular audience already know, what do they care about, and how does my idea connect to those things? Tailoring isn't about changing your message — it's about finding the entry points that make your communication connect.

Earn every word

Connection can also be lost through inattention. Brevity respects this reality. The best communicators were among the most economical with language. Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address' was 272 words. The unscripted, enduring portion of 'I Have a Dream' was 471. Hollywood's most quoted speeches, in Braveheart and Independence Day, were 139 and 128 words respectively.

Of course, short isn't always better. But every word you include is implicitly asking your audience to carry it. The words that don't earn their place become the ones that cause people to lose the thread.

This is where AI has become a useful editing partner. Tools like Claude or Gemini can identify redundant phrasing and suggest tighter constructions without losing your voice. However, you must push back and edit AI suggestions to ensure it doesn't muddle your perspective or hallucinate facts.

Earn your audience's attention

Even with brief and focused remarks, attention must be continuously earned. People sense when they're being talked at rather than communicated with. Once that sense sets in, you've lost them.

To avoid this, your first words must set the tone. So skip the introduction and agenda that your audience already knows, and open with a provocative statement, question, or story. Then, sustain engagement by varying your tone, pace, and body language, and by pulling the audience in through questions - even rhetorical ones - and polls.

In writing, sentence length does the same work. A short sentence after a long one creates rhythm. Rhythm creates readability. Readability keeps people with you.

Visuals follow the same logic. A slide that requires reading competes with the person presenting it. TED talks demonstrate the alternative, in which speakers hold the room with their presence alone, and a visual appears only when it's the clearest way to make a single point. The McKinsey format applies this to slides with one insight per slide that's stated plainly in the title ('Sales slip 3% in April from lower average receipts' rather than 'April sales results'). Everything else reserved for remarks or the appendix.

Three delicately crafted statements

For speeches, connection can also be lost through too little polish, or too much. However, the debate on whether to memorize or let it flow is a false choice. Memorize too much and you sound rehearsed; memorize nothing and you risk losing your sharpest lines that matter most. The better approach is to memorize exactly three things: your opening, your closing, and your key idea. Everything else can be internalized.

Your key idea is the sentence your audience should be able to repeat the next day, and repetition is how you make that happen. In one of the most watched TED talks of all time, Simon Sinek repeats the phrase 'people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it' six times. Most listeners don't notice the repetition, but they remember the insight.

Opening and closing deserve the same care. Resolve the question, statement, or story you posed in your opening in your final words. In the same talk, Sinek opens with 'how do we explain when others achieve things that seem to defy all assumptions?' and closes with 'it's those who start with why that have the ability to inspire those around them.' The loop creates a sense of completeness that audiences feel even if they can't articulate why.

For everything in between, the "accordion method" builds internalization without memorization. This method involves rehearsing your presentation in the allotted time, then again in half the time. Keep compressing like this until you're down to thirty seconds — that's the core of your argument. Then, rehearse back up to length by adding the same time increments each round. By the time you reach full length, your speech is internalized and the delivery stays fresh.

Connect emotionally

Aristotle's Rhetoric identified three elements of persuasion: logos, the logical credibility of your idea; ethos, the credibility and goodwill of the person delivering it; and pathos, the emotional connection between the message and the audience. The first two get a lot of attention in business communication, but the third is often most effective because effective communication is connection.

Emotional resonance doesn't require sentimentality. It requires stories with round characters whose transformation the audience can feel. Fortunately, three practitioners from very different disciplines have mapped its structure.

Matthew Dicks, a nine-time Moth GrandSLAM storytelling winner, calls "five-second moments" brief, climactic instants where a character's fundamental orientation shifts. For example, Star Wars is memorable and resonant largely from a five-second moment when Luke's skepticism of the force gives way to turning off the targeting computer; moments later, Han's consistent selfishness gives way when he sticks his neck out to cover Luke without promise of a reward. Those moments are why the film endures. Your stories need them too. And when you're not sure where to start your story, Dicks has a simple rule: name a location and an action. 'I was on a road trip with my brother when...' The scene is set in just a few words.
Ira Glass, host of the Peabody-Award-winning and Pulitzer-Prize-winning This American Life, adds useful nuance about perspective. Glass says don't tell the story from your perspective—nobody cares that much about you—and don’t tell it 100% from the subject’s. But do include both. Seeing how you interact with the subject is what creates the moments of likability, tension, and humor. You and your subject are the characters and how you interact is the drama.
Dan Roam, author of five bestselling books on communication clarity, provides a useful explanation of why this works in his illustration of storyline formats. Information can be conveyed in "the report", which is a flat readout; "the explanation", which provides insights with the information; "the pitch", which recommends a solution that will overcome a hurdle; and "the drama", which inspires a new way of looking at the world. No one gets promoted by providing reports, so structure your communication in other formats if you can. If you don't have a recommendation or time is short, at least ensure that your report follows Matt Abrahams' "What? So what? Now what?" format. What's the situation? Why does it matter? What are the next steps?

Finally, when speaking on behalf of an organization rather than yourself, a vision statement does the emotional work that a personal story otherwise provides. Vision statements must be high-level to keep them relatable to every person in the room. Think: 'we exist to discover novel ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and bring them to scale' versus 'we exist to plant one million trees.' The first invites the audience into a mission. The second gives them a metric.

Practice for poise and polish

Knowing these techniques and being able to deploy them under pressure are different skills. In performance, the more attention you spend managing your delivery, the less you have available for reading the room and connecting with your audience. Fortunately, practice is how techniques become instinct. Toastmasters, improv classes, and company-sponsored presentation opportunities all provide low-stakes environments to expand your comfort zone before the stakes are real.

Practice won't eliminate all nervousness, so it's also helpful to reframe it. Physiologically, anxiety and excitement are nearly identical, so stay in character and tell yourself that the nerves you're feeling are excitement. And if you blank, the recovery is simple: take a breath, repeat your last point, or ask the audience a question. The pause that feels eternal to you is barely perceptible to them.

What your audience needs from you

Communication becomes influence when it has the simplicity and emotion required to connect.

Smart, prepared people can fail to move their audiences because they're focused on their own performance. The communicators who influence are focused on what their audience can receive.