Communication clarity: the difference between speakers and talkers

Liam Sandford
3 min readAug 28, 2024
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Sometimes it is what you do not say that says the most.

You may think that the more you talk the better your audience will understand. That is not correct at all. In fact, there is a huge benefit to not being long winded. Have you ever been to a conference and heard a presenter go on and on…and on? At some point they may even say, “I know I have been talking a while, but”.

Basically, they are saying to the audience, ‘yeah, I am talking more than I should, but I am going to keep going because I do not care about you, the audience.’ If you ever think you are speaking for a long time, that is because you are. It is a sign you should stop.

This person is a talker rather than a speaker. The two are very different:

Talker

A talker thinks value comes from the length of time talking.

They continue to say words even after they have made the point they need to land. Often they will go around the houses and confuse the audience by saying more. The more they say, the more confusing it gets — the audience has to think hard to separate the signal from the noise.

You do not want to be a talker. If you have this tendency, when you start to realize you are overtalking, stop. Do this in every…

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Liam Sandford

I help ambitious people scale their impact with quiet communication • Best Selling Author of Effortless Public Speaking • liamsandford.com/subscribe