I have concluded professionally that I am far more effective when I repeat myself often in conversations: I get more evidence later that the information I was conveying actually gets across.
I have yet to decide whether it’s because people mostly don’t understand and/or forget what I’ve said, so repeating myself increases the odds of a particular message getting across, or because people understand repetition to be an indicator of importance, or for some other reason.
It frustrates me, but I try to do what works rather than what I think ought to work.
That’s a good point. Do you have a way of telling whether what you’re saying has registered, or do you use a heuristic that a certain number of repetitions is likely to work?
My impression is that a lot of repetition isn’t strategic, it’s nervousness (I think people are more likely to repeat themselves when they’re looking for support and feel unsure of getting it) or making sure they get more time in the conversation.
I came to the conclusion that repetition is valuable by looking at how often, after giving a presentation in which I convey certain facts, the audience subsequently follows up in ways that make it clear that they neither retained the facts nor the awareness that I’d presented those facts. When I started making a point of repeating my key points several times during a presentation, tying it back to multiple different topics and multiple different questions, the incidence of that sort of followup question dropped.
That said, I haven’t done a careful study, and I could easily be misattributing the result to the wrong cause. For that matter, I could easily be perceiving a result that isn’t actually there. Humans make those sorts of errors all the time.
I agree that a lot of repetition is nervousness, and that a lot of it is an attempt to grab floor-time. (I’m not sure I’d call the latter nonstrategic.)
I also think a lot of repetition is an attempt to maintain control of the attention of the group. (As in: A: “X” B: “Y” C: “NOT(Y)” A: “X.”
Looking back at this, it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood your question and thus answered a different one that you meant to ask. There are things that I take as real-time indications that what I’ve said has registered—for example, being able to answer questions or to ask sensible ones—and things that I take as indicators that it hasn’t, such as asking questions I’ve already answered. When I’m talking to groups I often get neither, unless I’ve done enough prep to create exercises specifically intended to obtain them,
I have concluded professionally that I am far more effective when I repeat myself often in conversations: I get more evidence later that the information I was conveying actually gets across.
I have yet to decide whether it’s because people mostly don’t understand and/or forget what I’ve said, so repeating myself increases the odds of a particular message getting across, or because people understand repetition to be an indicator of importance, or for some other reason.
It frustrates me, but I try to do what works rather than what I think ought to work.
That’s a good point. Do you have a way of telling whether what you’re saying has registered, or do you use a heuristic that a certain number of repetitions is likely to work?
My impression is that a lot of repetition isn’t strategic, it’s nervousness (I think people are more likely to repeat themselves when they’re looking for support and feel unsure of getting it) or making sure they get more time in the conversation.
I came to the conclusion that repetition is valuable by looking at how often, after giving a presentation in which I convey certain facts, the audience subsequently follows up in ways that make it clear that they neither retained the facts nor the awareness that I’d presented those facts. When I started making a point of repeating my key points several times during a presentation, tying it back to multiple different topics and multiple different questions, the incidence of that sort of followup question dropped.
That said, I haven’t done a careful study, and I could easily be misattributing the result to the wrong cause. For that matter, I could easily be perceiving a result that isn’t actually there. Humans make those sorts of errors all the time.
I agree that a lot of repetition is nervousness, and that a lot of it is an attempt to grab floor-time. (I’m not sure I’d call the latter nonstrategic.)
I also think a lot of repetition is an attempt to maintain control of the attention of the group. (As in:
A: “X”
B: “Y”
C: “NOT(Y)”
A: “X.”
Looking back at this, it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood your question and thus answered a different one that you meant to ask. There are things that I take as real-time indications that what I’ve said has registered—for example, being able to answer questions or to ask sensible ones—and things that I take as indicators that it hasn’t, such as asking questions I’ve already answered. When I’m talking to groups I often get neither, unless I’ve done enough prep to create exercises specifically intended to obtain them,