How to become articulate

Eschew obfuscation.

eschew: deliberately avoid using; abstain from.

obfuscation: the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.

Untangle the ineffable.

ineffable: too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.

The most dangerous person is one who is articulate. - Jordan Peterson

Can you articulate your thoughts?

Are you awful at speaking in person? Do you stutter and stumble over your words? Are you unable to formulate coherent and articulate sentences to express your beliefs and thoughts?

How to become articulate

If you want to make yourself articulate, not only should you read, but you should write down what you think. If you can do that a little bit every day, 15 minutes, maybe you could steal 15 minutes and do it everyday. But if you do that for 10 years, you really straighten out your thinking. If you are going to speak effectively, you have to know way more than you are talking about.

This is often difficult for beginning lectures at university because they will do a lecture on a topic, but they only know as much as they are saying in the lecture and they get kind of stuck to their notes because of it.

But you want to know 10 times as much as you are saying in the lecture, and then you can specify a stepping path through it and elaborate with the other things that you know. But to do that, you have to do a lot of reading. Because that is where the synthesis, the synthesizing comes from. That is on the input side.

On the output side, there are some tricks and techniques. If you are speaking in front of a group, you are not delivering a talk to a group. That is not what you are doing. The talk is not a package thing that you present to a group. There isn’t a group. There is a bunch of individuals - and you talk to them.

When you talk to a group, always talk to people one at a time. That makes it easier too - because, you know how to talk to a person. Can you talk to a thousand people? Probably not - because it is too intimidating. But there isn’t a thousand people there - there’s a thousand individuals. You just look at an individual and you say something and you can tell if they are engaged, they look confused, they look interested, they look angry, they look bored, or maybe they are asleep - in which case, you look at someone else and they give you feedback about how you are doing.

So one thing is to have something to say. The next thing is to pay attention to who you are talking to. Unless you are very badly socialized, if you present yourself atleast moderately well and if you pay attention to the individuals that you are talking to, your natural wealth of social skill will manifest itself - that probability is extremely high.

You don’t deliver a talk to an audience. Thats a really bad way of thinking about it. You are actually engaged in a conversation with an audience. Even if they are not talking, they are nodding and shifting position, and giving you feedback. You can pull all that in and use it to govern the level at which you are addressing the entire audience.

Having the aim to be a good communicator is a good start. This is the whole point of a liberal education. There isn’t anything that you can possibly do that makes you more competent in everything you do than to learn how to communicate. It doesn’t matter if you are a carpenter. If you are a good at communicating while you are a carpenter, you are 10 times better as a carpenter. You can negotiate with your clients. You can introduce your co-workers. You can make a case for your employees. You can advertise your services. You can think through your problems. You are firing on all cylinders.

The liberal arts colleges don’t do a very good job of marketing this. Whats the use of a bachelors degree in Bachelor of Arts? You can think, you can write, you can speak.

You read something. The economic value of that is incalculable. The people that I’ve watched in my life that are spectacularly successful are - they have skills - clearly, that is a minimum precondition - but they are also very very good at articulating themselves. Whenever they negotiate, they are successful. That is kind of like the definition of success in life. It doesn’t mean you win. Because if you are a good negotiator, everybody walks away from the negotiation thrilled. People line up to do things with you. All of that depends on your ability to communicate.

The case for being articulate

“Articulate” is an interesting word. Your fingers, joints are articulated. That means you can do things with them. They are not one solid, vague mass. They are differentiated. Someone who is graceful is articulated - they are compelling because they are articulated.

Speech is a form of articulation in that manner. The act of speech itself is extremely complicated motor activity. It is a complicated action to dance with your tongue.

It is definitely the case. There is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate.

One of things that is shocking is, young men are never taught this. Why be literate? Do you want to be competent and dangerous? Or do you want to be vague and useless? Those are your options. It doesn’t matter what your job is, what your profession is.

Our whole culture is based on the idea of the supremacy of the word. Based on the idea that it is the word itself that extracts habitable order from chaos and possibility. The reason our culture is predicated on that is because it is a deep truth, to the degree that our culture actually embodies that. It works.

So its a great thing to be articulate.

It would be lovely if our educators are wise enough to communicate this appropriately to young people who are striving forward and to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that if they want to make themselves into forces to be contended with, there is no sure root to that than an exceptional poetic literacy.

Its not like young people do not have intuition of this. There are reasons they admire rap musicians who are often extraordinarily articulate in their performance, in their capacity for spontaneous poetic utterance.

And the greatest people I met, including great warriors, are great in no small part because they are articulate. They know perfectly well and they are particularly well at articulating the fact that their success as eminent warriors is in no small part dependent upon their ability to communicate. Because they can communicate well, they can listen to the men under their command. They can explain to his superiors, the situation on the ground. They could make a case that the men under their command who are deserving would be promoted. Because they can think in an articulate manner, they can plan strategically and not lose battles.

Whats the alternative?

Do you want to be inarticulate? You want to say “ah”, “like”, “hmm”, and pause and stumble and be unable to formulate a strategy? be unable to elucidate a vision? be unable to compel and convince other people? to entice them with your articulated vision of what might be? Why would you want that? You would choose awkwardness over grace? Its preposterous. Its beyond foolish.

I cannot understand why this case is being made in a compelling manner, particularly to young men. They are dropping out of the educational realm in droves. It is unbelievably sad.

How do you become articulate?

By paying attention to what you say. Thats a good start. You can think of this as an analogy. Imagine you are trying to walk across a swamp. The swamp is murky. But you know that there is a path of stone under the water but it twists and moves. If you stay on the path, you won’t drown - the crocodiles in the swamp won’t devour you. As you walk forward, you can feel with your feel with your next step where the stone might be. When you feel it solid, you take that step. And then, you do the same thing with your foot again. You search again and you find out whats solid and you step on it again. And you move forward in that manner. Thats what you do with your words. Its the same thing. You feel. “Is this the right word?” Is the fact that I am uttering it putting me together and making me intact and stronger or is it tearing me apart and making me dissolute and weak? We can learn to do that. I learned this in part by reading Carl Rogers. Rogers believed that - the integration of language and action was a necessary precondition for operation as an effective clinician. You have to align what you said with who you were. One of the things that your clients would be evaluating you for was that capability. Someone with that capability will manifest themselves as genuine and trustworthy, compelling and interesting. The entire combination that emerges out of the domain of articulate communication cannot be gamed. You feel your way.

I noticed this 40 years ago when I started thinking about these things. Much of what I said made me look weak. I don’t know why but sometimes, some of the things that I said didn’t have that effect. They weren’t accompanied by a sense of shame, with a sense of vulnerability. They were solid. At the beginning, that was probably only about 5% of what I said. The rest of it was instrumental. It was language I was using to get my way. There was an arrogance in my use of language that had to do with a desire to attain proximal victories, to appear smart, to win an argument, something like that. A very different idea than merely feeling my way along to see what word was appropriate at what moment. But we can learn to do that. We can listen to ourselves. We can stop humming and hawing and using the words “like”, “you know”, and other filler words like them. You can take the time necessary to craft your words carefully. And you can practice merely saying what you believe to be true. And you can read - read great writers. And you can write - write about what you think about the problems that obsess you. And you can become articulate as a consequence. And there will be nothing about that isn’t the adventure of your life. It is a moral endeavour in some real sense. To become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue. To become properly articulate is to make the word divine. And to treat it in that manner. To decide whether or not you believe that it is the case - that the divine word creates the world that is habitable and good.

If you don’t believe that, then what do you believe? If you do believe that, well, go all in. See what happens. See what happens if you become articulate.

Learn to pause. You can pause - it is a prayerful pause in some sense. When you are in a discussion with someone, you can ask yourself. They might present you with a question or conundrum or a proposition. Instead of responding with what you know to be right, you can just ask yourself “What do I actually think about that?” But it has to be a real question. It has to be the kind of question that you pose to someone you didn’t know. It has to be a question predicated on the idea that you might not know who you are. But you could ask. You have to want to know the answer. And the answer will make itself known. Because that is how thought works. And you can communicate that answer. If you do that, you will be interesting to the person that you are talking to. Right away. And if they do that, they will be interesting too. If you both do that, you will have an interesting conversation. And you will both grow as a consequence. Thats actually the pathway to growth. You just wait. You can wait, you can open up yourself to the possibility that what needs to be said will make itself manifest if that is what you are striving for, if that is what you are asking for. And then you can merely communicate that. You have to abandon instrumentality to do that.

One of the reasons Joe Rogan is successful is that, thats what Joe does. He just asks questions. He is not trying to get something from his guests. He is not trying to become more famous. He doesn’t need any more money. There is no instrumental utilization of language in his discourse. He is just a humble lunkhead - in the most profound sense - who would like to know more than he knows - and who asks all the stupid questions he can think up. And it turns out that he is actually very very smart - very well educated now after talking to hundreds and hundreds of people and listening. So the stupid questions he asks are not stupid - they are questions that are shared by virtually everyone that is listening. He takes his listeners along on this process of exploratory endeavour. It is the pathway to success. The same thing can be true of your life.

If you are guided by the spirit of honesty and inquiry and every word you say is reflective of what you believe to be the truth, then the pathway that you walk on is the golden pathway to success. I know that to be true.