Don't try to sound smart

My desire is not to sound smart.

There are people who try to sound smart and to what end? Who, precisely, other than themselves are they trying to impress?

My self-proclaimed worthy goal is, to become smarter by reading, researching, asking questions and listening to answers, doing, falling down-getting back up and always moving forward toward the objective.

There will be more wheat than chaff to your carefully selected words if you deliver messages filled with facts and skip the fluff.

Getting informed and staying on top of changes within a specific industry or business type is absolutely necessary to your success and the more focused and geographically targeted your findings are the more relevant. Becoming proactive in your increasingly informed professional posture not only helps you better relate to challenges and opportunities, it helps you to help others. When you study and gain a greater understanding, you can talk intelligently as opposed to fruitlessly attempting to sound smart.

In a fine Neil Simon play, a character uttered this piercing line when describing another character's conversational acumen: "They don't have much to say. It's just that you have to listen to so much to figure that out." 

Don't attempt to posture yourself as smart by trying to sound smart. You either are smart because you  currently possess relevant knowledge and you are actively increasing your knowledge, or you are not. There is no grey area in knowledge levels or knowledge lift.  Smart people know when they don't know. Insincere and uneducated talk, that is intended to impress, typically deafens ears faster than a screaming baby in a restaurant!

"I don't know" is a great answer when you don't know. The appropriate and comprehensive response when you don't know is:  "I don't know, but I will find out and get back to you." But do not try to buffalo your way past a situation where it is patently obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. Better to remain silent and be assumed ignorant than to open your uneducated mouth and remove all doubt.

A sure way to sound really, really dumb in a vain attempt to sound very smart is to use vocabulary that is obscene and offensive. If you don't have a smart enough vocabulary sufficient to make your point without using offensive or obscene language, it is entirely likely that you don't have a point worthy of consideration.