When people think about becoming a better public speaker, they often think about charisma.
They want to look confident. They want to hold the room. They want to be the kind of person who seems completely at ease in front of an audience.
I understand the appeal. We have all seen speakers who seem to have that natural presence. They walk on stage, and somehow the room leans in.
But charisma is a difficult thing to work on because it sounds like a quality you either have or do not have. “Be more charismatic” is not very useful advice. It is a bit like telling someone to “be more interesting” or “be more inspiring”. Nice idea, but where do you start?
That is why a recent study on TED Talks caught my attention.
The researchers used artificial intelligence to analyse 1,239 TED Talk transcripts from 2006 to 2013. They wanted to see whether there was a relationship between the clarity of a talk and audience engagement on YouTube, measured through views and likes. Each transcript was assessed across multiple AI runs on two dimensions: clarity of explanation and structure or logical flow.
The finding was not that delivery does not matter. It was not that charisma is irrelevant. The study did not compare clarity with body language, voice, stage presence or emotional connection.
What it did find was that clarity was strongly associated with engagement. Talks with clearer explanations and stronger structure tended to receive more likes and views, even after the researchers accounted for factors such as topic, duration and whether the talk was scientific or non-scientific.
That matters because clarity is something you can work on.
You may not be able to walk into your next presentation and simply decide to become charismatic. But you can decide what your main message is. You can organise your ideas in a way your audience can follow. You can cut the detail that belongs in the background rather than the presentation. You can explain an idea from the audience’s starting point, not yours.
That is learnable.
And for many speakers, especially nervous speakers, it may be the most useful place to start.
Public speaking is not one skill
One of the reasons public speaking feels so hard is that it is not one skill. It is several skills happening at once.
First, you have to build the presentation. That means choosing a message, shaping the structure, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, creating visuals if you need them, and making sure the audience can see why it matters.
Then you have to deliver it. That brings in voice, pace, body language, eye contact, pausing, movement, managing nerves and responding to the room.
No wonder people feel overwhelmed.
When someone says, “I need to get better at public speaking,” they are often thinking about the delivery side. They worry about looking nervous, speaking too fast, forgetting what they were going to say, or not sounding confident enough.
Those things matter. But the preparation side often matters more than people realise.
A clear talk is easier to deliver because you know where you are going. It is easier for the audience to follow because they can see the path. It is easier to recover if you lose your place because the structure gives you something to come back to.
A poorly structured talk, on the other hand, makes everything harder. You may have good content, but if the audience cannot see the point, they have to work too hard. Once they are working too hard, they start to drift.
That is not because they are lazy. It is because audiences have limited attention. They are listening while thinking about their own work, their own worries, the previous meeting, the next meeting and the email they should have replied to before they walked into the room.
Your job is not to make them do all the work.
Your job is to make the message easy enough to follow that they can stay with you.
What the TED Talk study tells us
The TED Talk study is interesting because these were already strong presentations. TED speakers are usually selected, coached and edited. These were not people rambling through a set of bullet points.
The talks scored highly overall for clarity and structure. In other words, the researchers were not comparing excellent talks with terrible talks. They were comparing good talks with other good talks.
Even within that high-quality group, clarity still mattered.
The researchers described clarity as more than simple language. It was not just about short words or short sentences. Their AI-based clarity measure looked at things such as explanatory coherence, logical organisation and how well the talk flowed from one idea to the next.
A clear talk is not necessarily a simplistic talk. It is not about dumbing things down. It is about making the thinking visible.
You can talk about complex ideas clearly. In fact, the more complex the topic, the more important clarity becomes.
The study also suggested that clarity mattered across different types of talks, including scientific and non-scientific content. That makes sense to me. Whether you are explaining a technical issue, pitching a strategy, presenting research, leading a team meeting or speaking at a conference, people need to understand where you are taking them.
The curse of knowledge
The researchers connect their findings to the idea of processing fluency. Put simply, when information is easier to process, people tend to respond to it more positively. When information is difficult to decode, it creates mental friction.
Anyone who has sat through a confusing presentation knows this feeling.
At first, you try to keep up. Then you start wondering whether you missed something. Then you begin to feel slightly irritated, or bored, or tired. Eventually, you stop trying.
The speaker may be highly intelligent. The content may be valuable. But if the audience has to spend too much energy working out the point, the message gets lost.
This is particularly relevant for experts.
The more you know about a topic, the harder it can be to explain it clearly. You know the background. You understand the terminology. You can see the connections. You know why a particular detail matters.
Your audience may not.
This is the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it becomes difficult to remember what it was like not to know it.
I see this often in public speaking coaching.
When people feel nervous, they often retreat into technical expertise. They become more formal. They add more detail. They use language that feels safe because it proves they know what they are talking about.
But the audience does not need proof of everything you know.
They need a path through it.
That is especially true when the stakes feel high. If you are presenting to senior leaders, speaking at a conference, briefing a board or pitching for funding, the temptation is to pack the presentation with evidence. You want to cover every angle. You want to show you have done the work.
The problem is that more information does not always create more confidence in the audience.
Sometimes it creates fog.
Clarity is not the opposite of depth
One concern I sometimes hear is that making a message clearer means making it less sophisticated.
It does not.
Clarity is not about removing the intelligence from your work. It is about removing the unnecessary effort from the audience’s experience.
There is a difference between a talk that is rich and a talk that is overloaded.
A rich talk has substance. It gives the audience something worth thinking about. It may challenge them. It may introduce a new idea or reframe an old one.
An overloaded talk gives the audience too many ideas at once. It has no clear hierarchy. Everything seems important, so nothing stands out.
Clear speakers make choices. They decide what the audience most needs to understand, remember or do. They create a structure that supports that purpose.
That can feel uncomfortable, especially for people who care deeply about their subject. Leaving things out can feel irresponsible. But a presentation is not a document. It is not a data dump. It is a guided experience for the audience.
You can always provide extra detail in a report, handout, appendix or follow-up conversation.
The talk itself needs a spine.
What to think about when preparing a talk
A useful place to start is with one question:
What is the one thing I want this audience to understand, remember or act on?
Not five things. Not a general topic. One main message.
For example, “I am going to talk about our new client onboarding process” is a topic. It is not yet a message.
A clearer message might be: “Our current onboarding process is costing us time and trust, and three small changes would make the experience smoother for clients and staff.”
That message already gives the talk direction. It tells the audience why the topic matters and what kind of journey they are about to go on.
Once you have the message, think about structure.
A simple structure might be:
The problem: What is happening now, and why does it matter?
The insight: What do we need to understand differently?
The response: What should we do next?
Or, for a proposal:
The opportunity: What is possible?
The recommendation: What are you suggesting?
The benefits: Why is this worth doing?
The next step: What do you need from the audience?
The exact structure depends on the situation. The point is not to force every talk into the same formula. The point is to make the logic easy to follow.
Your audience should not have to wonder, “Why are they telling me this?” or “Where is this going?”
They should feel guided.
What this means for nervous speakers
For people with public speaking anxiety, this is encouraging.
Nervous speakers often put a huge amount of pressure on how they will come across. They monitor themselves while they speak. They worry about their hands, their voice, their face, their breathing, their pauses and whether everyone can tell they are nervous.
That self-monitoring is exhausting.
Working on clarity gives you a better focus. Instead of asking, “How am I performing?” you can ask, “Is my message getting through?”
It moves your attention from yourself to the audience. It gives you something concrete to work on before you speak. It also helps you feel more prepared because you are not relying on confidence to carry you through. You have a structure.
Confidence often arrives after you start, not before. A clear opening, a clear message and a clear path through the talk give you a better chance of finding your footing.
You do not need to become a different person to be an effective speaker.
You need to help the audience understand.
Clear is not easy, but it is possible
Delivery still matters. Voice, pace, body language and presence all affect how a message lands. The TED Talk study does not tell us that clarity is more important than delivery, because it was not designed to compare them.
But delivery has to carry something.
You can be warm, animated and polished, but if your message is muddled, the audience will still struggle. On the other hand, a speaker who is not naturally charismatic can be highly effective if the message is clear, relevant and well structured.
That is the part many people underestimate.
You do not have to dazzle people.
You have to reach them.
Clear communication takes work. Often more work than complicated communication. It is easier to include everything than to make decisions. It is easier to use familiar technical language than to translate your thinking for the audience. It is easier to build slides around what you know than around what the audience needs.
But if you want people to listen, remember and act, clarity is not optional.
The TED Talk study gives us a useful reminder: even among strong speakers, the talks that were clearer tended to engage more people. Not because clarity is the only thing that matters, but because it makes everything else easier for the audience.
And unlike charisma, clarity gives you somewhere specific to begin.
Before your next presentation, do not start by asking, “How can I be more impressive?”
Ask:
What do I want them to understand?
Why should they care?
What is the clearest path I can create for them?
That may not sound as glamorous as charisma.
But it is a lot more useful.
