Structuring Ideas

Our communication should be consistent with our ideas. Our ideas should be congruent with our thought process. Thought process is an unstructured mechanism through which thoughts flash across your mind in no particular order. Being the master of your mind, you should be able to structure them in a manner that does not confuse the person who is reading or listening to you.

A situation where you are talking to a person about what you like on your breakfast table and talking about the idly and suddenly jump to another discussion about how your dog chased a thief the other night. "I like idly sambar for break fast and i am amazed at the way how the little idiot chased the thief across our garden that night" Ideas should be congruent, communication depends a lot on how you put one idea after the other with out missing the previous idea.

I always suggest speakers or writers to follow the clouding method to put the ideas across. At the center of the group of clouds you are creating is your core idea or thought. From that cloud, you create another cloud which is the priority one among the different ideas, then cloud two then cloud 3 and so on. in each cloud again will have some smaller clouds which could be further ideas on the smaller cloud. This was you will end up with a mind map of what you want to talk about and what are the points which come after each one important issue. This helps you not only structure the ideas but also give completeness to the whole issue.

People follow various methods like bullet points on the issues or asterisks to create a structure but a pictorial representation in the mind of the points which you would like to talk would make retrieval of ideas easier than the bullet points. Our mind identifies patterns and pictures easily than notes. If you have seven points to talk about in an idea, you imagine a heptagonal cloud bone and you are sure that you have 7 points to talk about in this issue. This keeps you away from the tension of putting the points by heart.

Structure gives identity and recall to ideas and thus makes your presentation or speech easy to recall and remember.