Litt tells CNBC that communication becomes messy and ineffective when the person writing or speaking doesn’t have a clear sense of what he or she wants the result to be.
“Sometimes where you can lose the thread a little bit is when you don’t quite know what the point is, when you don’t know what you want the other person to do with the information you’re about to give them,” he says.
“That is the challenge that all of us face when you’re trying to communicate, whether it’s something very big or something very focused and small.
“We’ve all gotten e-mails that are too long or they don’t really have a point and you don’t know what someone wants from you,” says Litt, who stepped down as Senior Presidential Speechwriter, to become head writer and producer for comedy website Funny or Die in January 2016. A memoir of his years coming of age in the White House, “Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years,” is due out in September.
“I don’t think that every email you need to spend the amount of time that you would spend on a Presidential speech,” says Litt.
Your communication will be more effective if you understand “here is the way we want the audience to either change their opinion or change their behavior, and we know exactly what we want, and now I’m going to get it via in this … e-mail or via memo or a tweet.
“There’s all sorts of ways to communicate, but the basic idea of — we want someone to change their opinion or change the way that they act — that’s pretty universal.”
See also:
Tim Ferriss’ simple 3-step strategy for managing fear is his secret to business success
How skills learned in ‘survival jobs’ helped this SNL star make it big