Writing and Speaking

A speaker's success is defined on how well they can connect with their audience and deliver their message in a way that the audience will understand. People usually enjoy speakers when they are speaking on a topic on which the people are interested compared to people not being interested when they are forced to listen to a speaker. The same goes for written communication, you must connect with your audience and deliver a clear message. The difference becomes that a writer has the option to edit and change their communication before communicating with their audience. Either way, successful written or verbal communication is determined by what our outcomes are for our communication. If you can communicate your point and influence the audience then you are a successful.

It happens with poets too. Some poets used to read their poetry to an audience, and if it wasn't shallow enough to be understood by the average person, they were booed. Great ideas need time to be understood and absorbed, and a listener simply doesn't have the time.

There is very little useful content in this essay, and the arrogance with which is presented has clearly rubbed some the wrong way. Let's address the same topic with reminders of what most of us know but might like to have a handy cheat sheet for.

Speaking:

Lets the audience see your face and body.

Lets the audience connect with your emotional state.

Lets you use humor based on timing, intonation, homonyms, slapstick, etc.

Lets you gesture for emphasis and explanation.

Lets you use rhythm and volume.

Lets you interact with a crowd rather than an individual.

Lets you control the speed and continuity of information transfer.

Gives the opportunity to match words with other dynamic visuals.

And this is with only one person talking on a stage. The superset of oral communication, of which the speech is a tiny subset, is huge.

Writing:

Can contain far more information in a longer form.

Can contain far denser information assuming that a reader can re-read and grok at their own pace.

Is much easier to compress, store, transfer and search.

Allows for footnotes, citations, links etc which encompass a freedom of consumptive flow. (Do I read the footnote now or come back to it?)

Also a bit less clearly, writing:

Is considered more serious. 'put it in writing' vs. 'just hot air.'

Often takes considerably more time to produce, lending it implied value.

May be assumed to be the end result of a great deal of careful thought.

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It takes a lot of time to add the skills of persuasion and performance to the skills of thinking clearly, generating good ideas, and writing them down. It also means you get to convey fewer ideas in the same amount of time.

Perhaps PG isn't willing to make this tradeoff, but there is a lesser and necessary tradeoff to be made.

A speech does not have to be an entertaining performance, it can be terse, information packed, and extremely useful. The annoying thing though is that for any public speech to work it has a set of things it needs to avoid. Pauses, twitches, perspiration, clothing faux pas. Stupid things that distract an audience.

While PG is correct that you can have a beautiful content free performance, that really isn't his concern. What does he care how other people speak? Instead he should focus on perfecting the basics of public speaking technique so his audience forgets about the medium and can concentrate on his ideas.

The counter-example is Kathy Sierra. I don't know if she still gives talks, but her presentations at SXSW several years ago totally change the way I think about app development. She also had an excellent blog, but her presentations were even better because she used the slides to both show examples and also heighten emotional momentum (which in itself the theme of her work - making your apps loveable).

Perhaps if you had been explaining this on stage instead of trying to write it down it would've been more clear. ;)