It ain't what you say. It's way say that you it the.

It was in 1955 that the brilliant Noam Chomsky, famed as the father of modern linguistics, coined the following nonsense:

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.'

He was seeking to demonstrate that a sentence can be at once perfectly correct and perfectly meaningless.

To push home his point, he contrasted it with:

'Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.'

The first sentence is semantic nonsense.  (Ideas don't sleep.  Nothing sleeps furiously. If ideas are colourless, they can't be green.)

But at least it has the decency to follow the rules of grammar.  Whereas the second pokes you in the eye by breaking the rules of syntax, too.

You have two different kinds of nonsense here: content and structural.  It's the structural variety that is the most disruptive to clarity of communication.  Because, worse than nonsense, it's gibberish.

This suggests - and it comes as some relief to me - that it's OK to talk rubbish, so long as you talk rubbish properly.

Now I'm not sure that's how Chomsky would put it.   He was looking at language, not at communication in its wider sense, but I think there's a parallel here.

If clarity depends as much on structure as on content, then the order in which you make your points is as important as the points you're trying to make.  Isn't it?

Human ingenuity can find meaning in nonsense.  But it requires effort to find sense in gibberish.  Who's going to make that effort?

So perhaps it's worth giving at least as much thought to the structure of your communication as to the content of it.  Perhaps even to make structure the starting point for planning it.

For example, I know I'm going to say three things.  Now, what are they?

Or, I'll discuss the problem first and the solution second.  Now, what's the problem and what's the solution?

Or, I'll use a house as a metaphor for my topic.  Now where do I enter, what's downstairs and what's upstairs?

To prove my point about human ingenuity finding meaning in nonsense, here's an entry to a literary competition held by Stanford University in 1985.  Contestants were invited to make sense of Chomsky's sentence in no more than 100 words.  It's by C.M. Street, courtesy of wikipedia.

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.