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Writing and Speaking

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writing and Speaking

#161

Post by harold »

edw519 wrote: post #58

I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier. I have seen many great speakers in person (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Steven Covey) and almost always come away underwhelmed. I struggle to understand why the audience gets so worked up with so little content transferred. I have trouble with co…

I think one can be a great communicator without being a great speaker. True passion for a subject comes through, even if a person says "ummm" a lot. It might be harder to be a good "listener" than a good speaker when it comes right down to it.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#162

Post by mikeleeorg »

ckuehne wrote: post #2

An opinion by Nassim Taleb on the subject (posted on his facebook page): "I have been told by conference organizers and other rationalistic, empirically challenged fellows that one needs to be clear, deliver a crisp message, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Or speak with the fake articulations of T.V. announcers. Charlatans try sending authors to “speech school”. None of that. I find i…

I've been trying to find it to no avail, but I read somewhere that listeners are more apt to remember something if they required effort to hear it, almost as if the work it took reinforced the memorization of it.

Anyone familiar with that assertion and remember its source? Perhaps I should have had someone whisper it to me in a strange accent.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#163

Post by shiro »

"Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought."

In speaking, pause can carry meaning. A lot of it. It doesn't need to be a calculated pause; the fact that you're lost there can tell "what you really are" to the audience, if you're totally engaged to the act of presenting yourself.

I don't speech a lot but I act. It is often emphasized in acting that words don't matter much. It is often the case that you convey messages that's even opposite from what you actually say. In tech speech you don't want too much subtext, but still, there are more bandwidth in nonverbal channels than the actual content of the speech. If you only look at the words it might be less than well thought-out writings, but in speech there is other information.

(BTW, as you find more ideas while writing essays, actors find more insights while speaking lines---deeper meaning of lines, or deeper understanding of characters, that sometimes the author hasn't realized consciously. I'd just say they are totally different things. I prefer finding out deeper meanings of a given script by acting it out, to writing a new script.)

Re: Writing and Speaking

#164

Post by bootload »

"... I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. ..."

I think the speech degrades somewhat with the audience size and formality but not the ideas. If you want to see a good example of pg talking, listen to this great interview where he tears up Berkman fellow David Weinberger interviewing him on, 'taste for makers', 2006 ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2DkhL_Bypo

I'm glad these speeches are recorded because pg punctuates his essays verbally. I often find myself copying this style reading them.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#165

Post by drx »

drostie wrote: post #152
pg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that. Good writing should sound like spoken language. One of the classic mistakes of beginning writers is to use excessively formal diction, e.g. to use connectives like "furthermore" that they'd never use when speaking.

Well, it depends what you're writing. One of the horrible things about early fiction is that the writers usually insert their own interpretations of how characters talk -- including stuttering and "ums" and whatnot. Thankfully much of this is wasted on fanfic, where you know what the author was trying to emulate -- but usually it's a distraction. Great characters can get by without habits written into their dialogue.

Characters with speech habits are not necessarily a bad thing -- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak (warning: tvtropes link)

Re: Writing and Speaking

#166

Post by j_baker »

edw519 wrote: post #58

I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier. I have seen many great speakers in person (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Steven Covey) and almost always come away underwhelmed. I struggle to understand why the audience gets so worked up with so little content transferred. I have trouble with co…

I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier.

It's worth pointing out that the first sentence is very extraverted. In fact, if you read between the lines a bit, this is a very extraverted post. That's not bad. It's just that it's always interesting to note how extraverted introverts (myself included) can be without realizing it. Vice versa for extraverts.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#167

Post by Alex3917 »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #160
pg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.

I believe I've heard of linguistic studies which demonstrate that the use of "filler" words like um is, in part, a form of "code switching". For example, when teenagers talk to their peers, or to people they don't particularly respect, their speech will tend to be peppered with ums and you knows and likes [1], as in: "I'd, um, you know, prefer to watch something, like, interesting.". But when talking to respected eld…

"It's often a subconscious but deliberate technique for setting an informal mood."

This is interesting, but I doubt it applies to when people do it when speaking in front of a large group of people. Public speaking tends to require a lot more cognitive resources than answering basic questions from supervisors.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#168

Post by wahnfrieden »

Is Paul Graham only posting this in reaction to the criticism over his excessive "um"s and otherwise poor public speaking abilities? Is this a good response to that, to downplay speaking itself as an excuse for. Wing poor at it? Honest question.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#169

Post by patio11 »

pg wrote: post #140
jonstjohn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I heard PG speak at PyCon last weekend, I hardly even noticed any 'ums' - in fact, it wasn't until I saw it raised on HN that I remembered it. I was thoroughly engaged in his ideas, and my mind likely used those pauses to process what he was saying.

The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.

I will say this in the spirit of somebody who started competitive public speaking as therapy to overcome a speech disorder which would have been virtually disabling professionally: you can hack your way through hesitation noises. A lot of the HN comments suggesting practical ways to do so would be effective. ("Speak slower" and "Use the air gap for a dramatic pause" are my two favorites.) Practice plus directed effort will very quickly make this not a problem for you. It is totally not a given that you will revert to habit when not paying attention, when speaking off the cuff, or when saying interesting and important things. You just need to get into a new, successful habit, just like you long ago cultivated a habit of e.g. not spelling words wrongly.

(n.b. I have issues with hesitation noises myself occasionally. When I have the opportunity I watch / listen to tapes of myself, count influencies, and avoid things that cause that number to spike, because improving on this is a priority for me. For example, the worst I ever did last year -- TwilioConf -- had 1/20th the incidence of my typical performance in middle school, and on good days you wouldn't be able to tell I'd actually struggled with this.)

[P.S. This is going to sound a little fluffy but it is absolutely true: one of the first steps is to stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them", because that identifies a specific issue which can be fixed by an identifiable behavioral change, rather than solidifying an identity around features of past speeches you may have made.]

Re: Writing and Speaking

#170

Post by jwco »

pg wrote: post #81
apl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't claim that, of course, but something of similar intent is implied in this paragraph: > A few years later I heard a talk by someone who > was not merely a better speaker than me, but > a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I > decided I'd pay close attention to what he > said, to learn how he did it. After about ten > sentences I found myself thinking "I don't > want to be a good speaker." A charitable readi…

I don't see how you think that passage implies "people who speak [well] cannot think." All I'm saying is that speaking well depends little on having good ideas. That doesn't imply people who speak well can't have good ideas, just that they don't need to. Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas. Is someone who says that saying "clarity of thought or soccer ability, pick one?"

"Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas."

This statement seems to me to be profoundly wrong.

Perhaps some ways of "playing soccer well" depend little on having good ideas. But soccer is a very complex game: the configuration space of the players on the field is ~2*11 dimensional per team (add the z dimension for jumping and the ball in the air and you see that the total coordinate and momentum space is even vaster than 44 dimensions). Good teams are capable of organizing into configurations on the fly which are more likely to lead to goal than other configurations, and they can do this in response to the configuration of the opposing team. The Spanish team that won the most recent World Cup is a great example of 11 players who self-organize into optimal configurations in real-time.

You might argue that some players can use pure athleticism to navigate through the 44+ dimensional space and score goals. Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona are great examples: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYet49BToLw. They share a unique build which is suited to their style of soccer playing. They are not tall, have a low center of gravity, they can accelerate and pivot very quickly, and still they have a high top speed. That allows them to make runs like those "Goals of the Century" in the linked video in which they single-handedly beat the opposing team to a score.

However I would still hesitate to say that Messi and Maradona don't need good ideas to make those runs. Exactly where they choose to run probably depends strongly on where the defenders are relative to the ball-carrier's position. Also how fast they choose to run at any moment can depend on how fast those defenders are moving--hence the utility of pivot moves. Watch Messi beat the defender that comes at him from behind at 36-37 seconds, shown from another angle at 48-49 seconds; Messi gives the illusion that he has eyes in the back of his head. But really he has played soccer so much that he can take one glace around the field and calculate which defenders can reach his position and how fast they must be moving and in what direction in order to do so. This is not a trivial calculation to do at the rapid speed required by the game.

One of my favorite positions to play is Center Midfield. This midfielder often has more control than any other player to influence to configuration space of his team. One of my favorite players to watch do this was the brilliant Zinedine Zidane. He was a technically gifted footballer, but that's a relatively small part of why I loved watching him. The main reason is because of his perspicacity and decision-making skills. It is not just as if he has eyes in the back of his head; it is as if he can see the game as we spectators see it, with a birds-eye view. His brain is closer some kind of soccer video game AI that can calculate the optimal place to put the ball based on current configuration of the 22 players.

One of my favorite matches was Zidane vs. Brazil in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvYlvkWpPy4. Check out what Zidane does at 2:05-2:20. France is already up (on a Zidane assisted goal), so they do not need to score a goal. Still they would rather keep play near the opposing team's goal for the chance to score again and to decrease the likelihood of Brazil equalizing. So Zidane is basically playing keep away for the win. At 2:14 Zidane makes a hand gesture, directing a teammate into the space to his right. Brazil players respond, moving towards the space. Then he makes a pass in the completely opposite direction, which is probably what he planned to do all along. Possession is maintained by France and the clock ticks closer towards their victory.

Truly beautiful.

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