Thirty seconds
Describe the room you are sitting in, using only there is/are and preposition phrases. Thirty seconds. Go.
Before you start the thirty-second timer, predict:
1. When you have to talk fast with no preparation, what usually breaks first?
What a good ninety seconds sounds like
Model — Silverwood Drive, front to rear
Starting at the street. There is an asphalt driveway running up the south side of the lot to a carport. Along the frontage there is an aggregate concrete patio at the front entry, with a concrete staircase down to it, and there are several mature oaks over the whole front — the canopy covers most of it.
Moving to the side. Adjacent to the driveway there is a flagstone patio, and beyond it a flagstone seatwall. There are two flowering cherry trees here, one of them tilted and failing.
At the rear. There is a lower concrete patio and walkway, set about three feet below the upper level, with dry-stacked boulder walls holding the change in grade — the tallest is about eighteen inches. There are surface drains at three points. Against the rear boundary there is an outdoor shower.
Two constraints worth flagging. The front setback is sixty-five feet and the side setbacks are three feet minimum, so the buildable area is tight. And there is a lot of impervious surface here — just under three thousand square feet of it.
Notice the shape. Three location groups — street, side, rear — then a short closing move that names the two things a professional listener actually needs. That closing move is what separates a description from a briefing.
Check what you noticed about the model.
1. How many location groups does the model use before its closing move?
2. What does the closing move do that the rest of the description does not?
Signposting the walk
Moving between groups
These buy you thinking time and keep the listener oriented. Learn four; use them every time.
Match each signpost to the moment it belongs in.
Approximation. On site you rarely have exact numbers, and pretending you do is worse than hedging. Learn these four and use them freely:
about eighteen inches · roughly three feet · just under three thousand square feet · somewhere in the region of…
Note that about goes before the number in English. Portuguese speakers often place it after.
Signpost and approximate
Complete the walkthrough with signposting and approximation language.
at the street, there is an asphalt driveway on the south side. to the rear, there are four dry-stacked boulder walls, the tallest eighteen inches. that there is a lower patio, set three feet below the upper level. Two things worth : the side setback is only three feet, and the existing impervious surface is just three thousand square feet.
Ninety seconds, three times
The same site, three times, getting shorter and better each time. This is the core of the lesson.
Task card
A plan you have not seen before, handed to you now
Describe it front to rear. Ninety seconds. Then do it again. Then once more.
- Run 1 — just get through it. Expect it to be messy.
- Run 2 — same site, but group by location and use three signposts.
- Run 3 — same again, but finish with the two-constraint closing move.
Before you start Run 1, put these three run goals in order.
Three runs on the same content is deliberate. The first is comprehension, the second is organisation, the third is delivery. Skipping to run three does not work.
Run 1 against run 3
Answer two questions:
- What got better between run 1 and run 3 — speed, organisation, vocabulary, or confidence?
- What did not improve, no matter how many times you repeated it? That is a real gap, not a nerves problem, and it goes straight into Lesson 6.
Fix the placement error in each sentence — the exact trap from Phase 03.
1. The wall is eighteen inches about.
2. The site is three thousand square feet under.
Before the next lesson
Homework. Do the three-run exercise alone, on one of your own sites, and record run 3. Bring the recording. Lesson 6 works on what is in it.
One check before you go.
1. How many of the three runs should you actually record for homework?