Communication

Have you ever run across this piece of advice on communication from the late Steve Allen: "In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehendedness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency, eschew all conglomerations of garrulity, jejune babblement , and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expiations have intelligibility and voracious vivacity, without rodomontade thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy, ventriloquial verbosity, and vain vapidity. In others words, say what you mean, mean what you say, and don't use big words."

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J. Michael Shannon is professor of preaching at Cincinnati Bible College in Cincinnati, OH.