Give one instruction at a time
Stacked instructions fail for anyone tired, anxious, learning the language or processing differently.
The BeingKind editorsPublished How this is written
Why it lands
Chaining three requests into one sentence is efficient for the speaker and frequently unusable for the listener — the first is retained and the rest is noise. The people most affected include those with learning disabilities, head injuries, hearing loss and anyone in a second language, none of whom will say so. Slowing down is invisible to everyone who did not need it.
How
One instruction, then a pause, then the next. Avoid idioms, which are the first thing to fail across a language gap. Ask them to tell you what they are going to do rather than asking whether they understood.
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