What should I do instead? Should I just do everything backwards?

Yes, almost! Use what I usually call the Headline Technique (or in short, Headlining).
Start with the summary, the overview. After that, use the rest of the available time to provide detail and clarify!

The Headlining Technique is similar to the model used by editors world-wide and also called "the Ingress Technique".

Ugh! Yuck! you may be saying.
I don't like journalists!
If you mean the tabloids, then I agree with you. But let's make use of techniques good editors use. And if there is one thing that is good, it is how they organize material.

Think about what a major daily newspaper looks like. Each day there are hundreds of articles. All the articles start with a headline.

A really good headline reveals the content – tells what it's all about by giving a summary of the summary. It will help us to decide if the article is interesting or not. If the headline is interesting, we'll continue to read the actual summary, the ingress. Often the ingress is printed in slightly bolder type than the rest of the text.

If the article is still interesting, we continue to read about more and more detail, for as long as we're interested. Some till read to the end of the article while others will not.

From a newspaper's point of view,
it's easy to decide how much of a journalist's manuscript to use.

The editor lets the amount of space and the assumed level of reader interest decide how much of an article to use.

In the editorial world, (believe it or not!) the task of shortening manuscripts is quite simply accomplished by editing from the bottom – by cutting out from the end.

At the larger newspapers, the majority of articles are shortened from the original text, and by comparing different editions of the same paper you would notice that the length of some articles varies.

Let's look at a normal newspaper article from the USA TODAY, July 24-26, 1998. I've inserted scissors, where the article might have ended – as you can see, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.

But why spend so much time on the world of editing? Do you think I'm planning to start a newspaper? No, but we can use the same method. In the time available, we want to be able to provide a certain amount of detail about the subject.
If for some reason we don't get all the time we hoped for, or if someone from the audience has to leave early, this only means that they won't hear as many details as someone who stays a little longer.

You don't have fewer main points in the short presentation than the longer one. You simply have time for fewer details.

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Suddenly, we've got a model that can withstand questions. If the person asking questions has seen the big picture, the questions asked will have a context. Questions won't live a life of their own. Questions will help rather than hinder and will make it easier to provide more and greater detail. And it will be easier for the listener to think of spontaneous questions.

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Are the Headlining Technique and the Logical-Historical Model exact opposites?

No! The Logical-Historical Model has a chronological order but this does NOT mean that Headlining uses a reverse chronology.

With Headlining you don't go from the future to the past, from the most important to the least important, from the most interesting to the least interesting. What you do is to try to speak (and write) according to your target group's order of interest!

Order of Interest!
- is the key to Headlining

If you want to be more interesting than your listener's or reader's own thoughts – follow their order of interest! This means that you must always start from your audience's perspective and not your own.

Start with what the listener/reader wants to know first and continue with what the listener/reader wants to know when he or she has understood the first point. And so on.

The figure oabove can give the impression that a presentation becomes more and more boring the longer it continues. This is not the case. What happens is that more and greater detail is presented – and the details are usually very interesting, since the listener/reader has a general picture and wants to know more. The level of interest tends to increase rather than decrease.

I'm often asked why I condemn the Logical-Historical Model. The big difference between Headlining and the Logical-Historical Model is that the former takes the One-Channel Hypothesis into consideration and the latter completely ignores it!

Sometimes I get the suggestion that I should propose a hybrid model: First the Headlining Technique, then a presentation based on the Logical-Historical Model, with background etc. A hybrid model is completely unnecessary! Headlining does not require any set or preconceived order of presentation – as long as you speak/write in your audience's order of interest it's OK – and to talk or write in any other order is hardly meaningful!

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Interesting! Tell me more about Headlining!

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Copyright © Bengt Hemlin 2002