I love to play charades, Pictionary, Cranium, basically any game where you have to try to guess what another person is trying to “say.” Unfortunately, I sometimes feel like my life is one of those games. Either the word I’m looking for won’t come to my head, or I lose track of what I’m saying in the middle of my sentence, or any number of other… In any case, as in charades, it takes a long time to get to the point.
So I’m dedicating this post to books that can help with verbal communication and getting to the point:
- Communicate Clearly, by Robert Heller: At 71 pages, with lots of pictures, this book looks most promising!
- Improve Your Communication Skills, by Alan Barker: Help with conversations, interviews, presentations and more.
- How to Run a Successful Meeting in Half the Time, by Milo O. Frank (author of How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds – or Less)
- That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others, by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.: This may not help me with brevity per se, but this linguist can definitely help improve communication.
-Kaarin
Eleventh Stack 
Kaarin
That’s what makes you a good librarian…figuring out not only what people are saying, but what they really mean when they say it.