Reading Simply Said vs. practicing it
Jay Sullivan's Simply Said is a great book on communication. But reading and doing are different skills. Here's what each gives you — and why they work best together.
Simply Said teaches you what good communication looks like. Practice is what makes you do it. Jay Sullivan's book is one of the clearest guides to communicating better at work — and reading it is worth your time. But reading and doing are different skills. The book changes what you know; only repetition changes what you default to under pressure. They work best together.
What the book gives you
Simply Said: Communicating Better at Work and Beyond lays out five principles: focus on the audience, say less, structure your ideas, listen before you answer, and lead with authenticity. They're simple, true, and memorable. In an afternoon you'll understand exactly what better communication looks like — and you'll probably underline half of it.
What the book can't do is be there at 4pm on a Tuesday when you're firing off a Slack message on autopilot. Principles you read don't automatically become principles you use.
What practice gives you
Practice is the transfer layer. Small, deliberate reps in your real work — rewrite this email, cut this paragraph, ask one more question in this meeting — wire the principle into your defaults. After enough reps, you don't recall the rule; you just write the clearer version first.
| Reading the book | Daily practice | |
|---|---|---|
| Changes | What you know | What you do by default |
| Time | An afternoon | 5 minutes a day, over weeks |
| Strength | Clear, complete mental model | Habit that holds under pressure |
| Gap | Knowing ≠ doing | Needs the principles first |
Use them together
The honest answer to "book or practice?" is both, in order. Read the book for the model. Then practice the model until it's a habit. The reading is the warm-up; the reps are the workout.
Where Make Your Point fits
Make Your Point is a daily-practice companion built on the same five principles. It's a 25-day Sprint — one short exercise each weekday — that turns the ideas into habits through writing drills, reflection prompts, and real-world challenges. You don't need to have read the book first; the course teaches the principles through practice. But if you have read it, the Sprint is where you finally apply what you underlined.
Day 1 is free; the full course is $49 one-time, no subscription. And we genuinely recommend reading Simply Said alongside it — it's the theory behind everything we built.
We are not affiliated with Jay Sullivan, his firm, or his publisher. Make Your Point is an independent practice tool inspired by his book.
How to write an email that actually gets answered
The audience-first move that gets faster replies — lead with the question your reader actually has.
How to cut your writing in half without losing the point
An editing method for writing less and meaning more — cut hedging, kill jargon, stop at the period.
Start with the point: the update format that gets read
Put the recommendation first. The structure that makes memos and updates land in one read.
Reading about this is the easy part.
Make Your Point turns these principles into 25 short daily exercises. Day 1 is free.
Make your first point — free