When interviewed for broadcast media, you won't "know your audience" as well as you might in face-to-face settings. But your listeners still are real people -- in Des Moines, in Wichita, and the like. Talk to them, not Ted Koppel. This guide's recommendations will help you to convert complexity into manageable chunks of information and to translate expert-speak into language that makes sense and resonates with real people.

When average citizens tune in to foreign policy issues, experts often bombard them with an endless stream of arcane facts about the world. Moreover, they tend to speak in jargony language that only has meaning for other experts. Vague shorthand like "Rwanda," "Kyoto," or "the Marshall Plan" -- which may say a lot to an audience of Council on Foreign Relations members -- means nothing to a nonexpert citizen. Nor do acronyms and abbreviations like USAID, IAEA, and FTAA, which are about as familiar to most Americans as the term "ICANN" (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) would be to anyone but a computer whiz. It turns out that even phrases and words that experts assume everyone understands -- WMD, development assistance, cooperative threat reduction, international norms, soft power -- are unfamiliar if not unintelligible to most Americans.

To reach wider audiences, turn your wonk-speak into words citizens will hear. Use declarative sentences and the active tense. When you speak, keep asking yourself, "Can I really assume they know what this means?" This guide's "Wonk-Speak Translator" may jump-start your thinking about alternatives.

In our fast-paced, information-overloaded society, we rarely have much time to explain complicated issues or elaborate on key points. TV and radio talk shows usually give guests less than a minute to speak before being interrupted. The format of most print stories encourages us to speak in sound bites that can be quoted. Human beings routinely rush to make sense of incoming information, quickly deciding whether to continue paying attention or to move on (see "Core Concepts and Terms"). Every word out of our mouth counts.

You can use fewer words and be more effective by using analogies, metaphors, and comparisons from daily life to evoke ideas and experiences that ordinary people can relate to. For instance, if you want to explain "capacity building" to listeners who have never heard the term, one strategy is to define the jargon, which might simply put your audience to sleep. A shortcut is to explain the concept through a familiar, memorable adage: "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime." The same holds for conveying the essence of your argument. Your call for more patient U.S. diplomacy in an international negotiation might make more sense if cast in terms of your grandmother's expression that "we can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." Your argument that it is sensible for America to do more to combat global warming today even in the face of some uncertainty might be best understood through an analogy to investments in insurance policies or the preventive steps we take to ward off disease.

This approach can be particularly important in talking about foreign affairs because -- according to cognitive linguists and sociologists -- most Americans think of international relations metaphorically in terms of interpersonal relations. This helps to explain why more Americans will connect with a communicator who argues, for instance, that "America shouldn't have been like the sore loser that stomped off the field before the game finished" than with the communicator who says "It wasn't fair that America terminated the treaty negotiation abruptly after winning so many concessions, abandoning a process that we had spent years working on."

Incorporating comparisons that invite people to draw on experiences in their families, communities, and businesses to understand your issue will help you engage nonexpert audiences, potentially opening minds and triggering new ways of thinking. An added benefit: These comparisons are highly quotable.

Don't expect numbers alone to tell your story or help to drive home your 3 or 4 key messages. Without the right big ideas that put them in a meaningful context, your numbers will just be mind-numbing. For instance, merely reporting that we have helped to secure "ten thousand tons" of nuclear material in Russia leaves listeners guessing how important the progress we've made really is. But if you put those tons in context (e.g., how many bombs could have been made from those tons ... what percentage of the total problem we've licked in securing those tons ...), your numbers reinforce a larger message: This is a fixable problem, we're making headway, and we could do more with greater investments.

Bring numbers to life by converting the statistics you cite most often into repeatable, contextualized phrases that nonexpert people can grasp, relate to, and visualize. "Three billion people" would mean more to someone who didn't know the world's total population if instead expressed as "nearly half the people on our planet." "Two dollars a day" becomes more concrete if it is put in the economic context of "less than most of us pay for a gallon of milk." "One-tenth of one percent of our GNP" is intelligible if it is translated into "$37 per American every year -- about as much as most of us spend on a couple of tickets at the movies and a bag of popcorn." Likewise, "the UN's annual budget is only $10 billion dollars" translates into "less than what Arkansas alone spends on its people in a year." And so on. Use simple numbers that help you tell positive stories and avoid staggering statistics that merely reinforce how overwhelming problems are (see recommendation 8 above).

Finally, don't expect mere statistics to correct deeply held public misperceptions, such as the widespread notion that America spends 15 to 20 times what it actually does on foreign aid. Without a carefully considered door-opening strategy, your facts may never sink in because they totally contradict what your listeners have long believed ("Her numbers just can't be right, that can't be the whole story."). Similarly, if you set up numbers with big ideas that just don't resonate with your audience, you risk losing your listeners before you even get to the numbers (e.g., saying "America is the least generous of all industrial countries when it comes to foreign aid" may just make your audience defensive or incredulous: "How dare that guy suggest we're not generous?! Where does he get his numbers?!"). Consult the sample wording in the guide's "Arguments and Facts" and "Common Critiques and Effective Responses" sections to create strategies that will help you segue to your well-framed numbers.

As you work to implement recommendations from communications and public opinion research, don't get so hung up on mechanics that you lose yourself in the process. For instance, though it is true that a "reasonable, rational" tone will get you furthest with most audiences (see recommendation 17), that doesn't mean you can never be passionate, provocative, or funny -- or express anger. If you come across as overly scripted, your listeners will tune out.

Use this guide and other communications advice you receive as a starting point to help you be more effective in using your own voice. Don't stray from what you believe or from sound scholarship to conform to a message. People have very good antennae for spin. Instead, use communications research to help you craft messages that allow you to speak the truth from your perspective in ways that have more lasting resonance and impact.