Teaching Communication

Essays on the Teaching of English
Raymond Stopper
Based on His Book, Teaching English, How To….

Teaching Students to Communicate in Formal Writing and Speaking

When I was introduced to a school board early in my career as their new language arts coordinator, K-12, I was taken aside by the president of the school board, a CEO for a New York company. Instead of “plastics” [as in the film The Graduate], he confided in me the formula for can’t-miss communication: Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. And tell them what you told them. "In my experience,” he said, “that’s always been the best method for communicating successfully.”

The formula has been around a long time, supposedly used by circuit-riding itinerant Methodist preachers to organize their sermons in rural early 19th-century England and in America when the West was being settled.

This formula for communication works in both formal writing and formal speaking.

To my students, the “Tell them….” Formula meant an opening paragraph that “tells them what they are going to tell them”; middle paragraphs that “tell them”; and, finally, a last paragraph that summarizes the composition or “tells them what they have told them.”

In formal writing, or in formal speaking, following the “Tell them” formula helps to communicate ideas effectively because, as one of my students at a community college said, “It’s like hitting your reader over the head three times with your message.” Amen.