KCard : Useless Details
|
Communicating nothing
In many situations it is often useful to be able to
say or write lengthy communications which purposely don't address a specific
aspect. This is a classical situations for politicians which when asked a
question will in fact provide a lengthy answer (which stops another question
being asked) with very little being said in reply to the initial question.
Another example is when a salesperson is asked for a price and he doesn't
want to give it directly. Whenever it is required to occult a given information this can be achieved by saying
something else instead, as long as people aren't too regarding, this usually
works. About rhetoric
There are many techniques which are classically in
the field rhetoric. See relevant KCards for the
techniques of rhetoric which are particularly adapted to this, for example
topics. Useless details
Here we develop an additional simple technique to
the ones of rhetoric. It is called useless details because it consists in
giving details about unimportant things while staying very vague about most
important things. This technique works well, because the details you will
give aren't irrelevant but simply aren't the ones the person really wants.
The idea is to consider the subject you're meant to talk about and consider
things which are clearly and naturally related. In fact, when asked a
question many of such elements are often in the question, or very close to
the question. For example if someone asks you how much your
product costs you can provide details about the product, the competitors, the
companies overall pricing policies, the company and so on. All these elements
are useless details and at the end the person will feel uncomfortable to
repeat is request because it makes him look like he lost attention and missed
the answer. If he does ask again, you can usually just repeat the same reply
again. This technique works particularly well in written
communication as you can bury the very little important information you're
willing to give in a pile of unimportant information you can give. This
obfuscates the fact that very little is said about what is important as
people get knocked out by the useless detail. This can go quite far, with a
bit of habit, you can write 10 pages about a product without giving any
details on the product's characteristics. |
Ideas to develop
|