Now it's time to roll up our sleeves and really get down to work. I've given you the criteria, you've picked your own topic. Now it's up to you to brainstorm on message points. A couple of tips. If you have a message point and it has the word and, however, therefore, baht or a comma, guess what? You haven't truly isolated one message.

One, you're putting together two or three message points make sense in real life with conversations, horrible thing to do when you're planning media messages, because reporters can isolate just one idea and not use what's after the buck or before the however. So you can't plan that. Well, you have to plan in isolation, every idea in isolation because we know in advance, reporters can use any one of our ideas So when you're writing these down on paper on a computer screen, if it's more than about 10 words, chances are you've already messed up. You're synthesizing multiple ideas together, not going to help you at this stage. Ultimately, you have to do that you have to do that in every other conversation you have in your career. But you can't do that yet, with the media.

So you've got to isolate one idea at a time, no ands, no connectives, no commas. One simple sentence. And of course, as we've discussed, no such thing as a sub point. Now, for those of you working in larger organizations, corporations, government entities, here's what typically happens. You've got an interview coming up later today, tomorrow, later this week. People get together.

They want to be helpful. They want to prepare they want to plan so someone will say well If the reporter asked this, what do we say? And someone else will try to be helpful? Oh, we'll say such instructions. And they'll talk for five minutes. And nobody's writing it down.

There's five paragraphs worth of content. And then someone said, Well, what if this is asked and someone else will give a smart, intelligent, rational answer, complete, utter waste of time. It simply doesn't do anything to help, prepare, package, refine your message, to get you to the point where you're in good shape for that interview. It's just kind of a way for people to waste time. Sounds smart, feels smart, doesn't do anything. So my recommendation is, it's perfectly fine to toss out a question.

But then someone in the room preferably you has the discipline to say, wait a minute. Let's write this one idea down. Stop talking a minute you have to do something that's Seems rude. Let's write it down. And then let's add another idea. And another idea because here's the issue.

Someone can give a three paragraph answer talk for three minutes, and it sounds great. But any one sentence within that three minute answer can be horrible to be disasters. What if that's the only message that gets into the final story. So you have to have the discipline of really isolating one idea at a time and looking at it on paper, or a computer screen. So let's do that. Now.