Be Understood

You make things very clear and plain when you want someone to understand what you are saying.

Dressing up communications with complexity, ambiguity, and ‘noise’ causes people to not understand.

You can tell if someone is trying ‘hoodwink’ or ‘pull one over on you’ if they make their communications unnecessarily wordy, complex, or complicated.

Many times highly educated people use overly complex communication to ensure that only people in their elite circles understand it, thereby excluding people they don’t want.

The document that defines the greatest form of government in the history of the world, the U.S. Constitution, is only 4,400 words (about 17 standard pages). Young people can read it and understand what it means. However many of the bills being written today are extremely wordy, complex, sometimes ambiguous, and elaborate.

Nephi had an important message to share with everyone and he went to great lengths to make it very plain, very simple, and therefore powerful and meaningful.

He wanted them to learn, avoid err, and understand.

When you have something important to say use clarity and plainness and others will understand you.

- 2 Nephi 25:4, 7, 20, 28