My friend Greg Stewart is putting his blogging efforts at Clarity Rules behind a movement he cares deeply about: the pursuit of clarity.

His manifesto is simple:

There is a great movement afoot, and I want to help:

Tribes have been started by the likes of Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte of Slide:ology, Dan Roam, Barbara Minto, Chip and Dan Heath and many others, and more and more, their work is having an effect on all of us:

We are improving the way we think and present.

Clarity Rules is a call to arms in support of this growing movement.

Its goal is to spread this good thinking. To be another voice insisting that clarity is an absolute necessity. To unpick tangled thinking. To smooth out waffle. To kill off bad presenting altogether. I want Clarity Rules to be a place where everyone can come and share their stories of clarity winning over obscurity, and to make sense of how it can be done.

I want use this blog to assemble everyone’s great ideas and techniques into a series of Clarity Rules we can all share and use.

So let me add some stories and some ideas for better clarity.

Yesterday I blogged about Richard Branson and his simple story to launch Virgin Money. That’s clarity.

A couple of weekends ago my daughter attended a presentation to help her pass her Japanese exams with 1,000 other Victorian students. The presenter read their slides for 90 minutes. That lacks clarity.

But then the presenter switched gears and had two past students role play a good and bad Japanese exam interview. That’s clarity.

Consultants using big words to make them sound more important and intelligent with gems such as transformational leadership, team-based solutions, re-engineered synergy, enhanced competence and retrospective coherence. That lacks clarity.

One of the reasons why these abstract concepts are lost on us is that we don’t have the real life experiences or stories of others’ experience to make sense of them. They are labels without an anchor.

So here is my clarity rule: when introducing a concept that your audience might unfamiliar with, illustrate the idea with a story to ground it and make it concrete.

Greg’s blog is in my must read RSS list because I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to be a better communicator. Plus he’s a friend. We’re never short of something to gas bag about.