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Writing and Speaking

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writing and Speaking

#191

Post by paulsutter »

pg wrote: post #184
ahoyhere wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enmity. I am intellectually galled by the laziness of many of pg's arguments. I agree with a lot of what he writes about creating things people want, on the other hand, and wish he would stick to writing about things he's good at -- or at least, when writing about something he's bad at, do it in an exploratory instead of declamatory fashion.

If you were driven by a disinterested search for the truth, your comments would not have the tone they do.

I really think there is more to this.

My guess - small changes in the way you use words may reduce the chance that you are badly misunderstood by some people.

I love your essays, but our personalities are probably similar. My friend Mike, who was always a word man when I was an idea guy, has a reaction to your writing that is so similar to hers that at first I was sure he was the author of her post.

When I read her point by point rebuttal, my reaction is that she seems to be missing the ideas behind the words, fighting the texture of the bark and missing the layout of the forest.

But in her mind the bark looks phony so the whole forest is a fraud.

The whole tension may be about personality and perspective, not truth and falsehoods.

I don't have an answer, or even specific suggestions. But I sense that there is something to learn here. And I suspect that you are more likely to solve the puzzle than she is.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#192

Post by snambi »

A speech is like music. In music, the composer goes from low tempo to high tempo. Every good song will have this pattern of going from low to high and then descending. Good speech has these elements too. Great orators, present their ideas with the tempo going up and end with a crescendo. Think Martin luther King, Obama etc.

Here, the content is important, but more important is the music like rhythm. Thus, it is more like entertainment, rather than conveying of ideas.

If you are in a live concert, the audience enjoy the music, most of them don't really understand it. It doesn't have to convey much, except to keep the audience engaged and inspired.

When conveying ideas, I think one-to-one conversation is best. In the absence of a one-to-one conversation, a speech that feels like a conversation or an essay would be best.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#193

Post by jeremymcanally »

pg wrote: post #182
ahoyhere wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some: "Having good ideas is most of writing well." How did you come to this conclusion? Evidence? Citations? Reasoning? "… how much less ideas mattered in speaking than writing" Is this based off just the ONE other speaker you mentioned? Any studies? Have you made a personal study of this yourself? Taken notes? I would like to hear some evidence or argument to back this up. "Being a really good speaker is no…

Ok, let's start from the beginning. You believe it's false that having good ideas is most of writing well. Can you give a counterexample? Can you give an example of an essay you consider to be a good piece of writing, and yet whose author you believe didn't know what he/she was talking about? Present company excepted of course.

I think you're changing your question from the first sentence to the next. I think what ahoyhere is taking issue with is not that good ideas are essential to writing well, but that good ideas are most of writing well (a statement that I, too, would argue isn't entirely accurate).

To re-use some of your essay's ideas, I've seen just as many well-loved "motivational writers" (e.g., Joel Osteen [who seems like the king of this sort of writing] or to use nerdier examples, Malcolm Gladwell [in some cases] and Seth Godin [to some extent]) as you've apparently seen bubble mouthed motivational speakers. I read books from authors like that, and, while well written, they don't actually do much for me intellectually other than motivate me to progress my own thinking or actions (i.e., very few actually new ideas are introduced to my brain).

Re: Writing and Speaking

#194

Post by devilant »

Paul is right. Writing is definitely the best way to convey and spread ideas. If you're a good enough writer, you can spark a reformation just by printing up a few copies of your 95 theses and passing them around. I think writing unfortunately took a back seat to speaking for the last 100 years thanks to radio and television, where a small number of charismatic speakers have been able to dominate the public discourse.

But that is changing again thanks to the internet. Take SOPA for example. SOPA was defeated not by an influential speaker making an impassioned anti-SOPA speech, but by blog posts and forum posts and reddit/hacker news posts on the internet. We're getting closer every day to the world of the novel Ender's Game, where Ender's brother and sister were able to influence international politics solely through their anonymous internet writings (something which I used to think was farfetched and ridiculous).

Re: Writing and Speaking

#195

Post by dennisgorelik »

patio11 wrote: post #169
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 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 effor…

I talk on Skype with my customers a lot (it has a phone number). Few months ago I installed MP3 Skype recorder plugin, so now all my conversations automatically recorded.

It definitely helps to listen to these conversations and fix umms/ehs, incorrect pronunciation (Russian accent) etc.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#196

Post by dennisgorelik »

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…

Teenagers' speech still sounds exactly like that.

:-)

Re: Writing and Speaking

#197

Post by ahoyhere »

dingfeng_quek wrote: post #186
pg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's start from the beginning. You believe it's false that having good ideas is most of writing well. Can you give a counterexample? Can you give an example of an essay you consider to be a good piece of writing, and yet whose author you believe didn't know what he/she was talking about? Present company excepted of course.

ahoyhere and pg's argument isn't clashing - while pg wrote his essay from his personal experience, ahoyhere demands (or at least appeals to) the consideration of a broad set of ideas related to a long history of thought and research. However, pg's essay is clear that it doesn't aim to be a well-founded research paper. Although ahoyhere is right that pg's essay will never be recognized as a good research paper (by int…

PG once wrote:

"I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it"

Here I am, helping… by not letting him get away with saying stupider stuff than he has in the past.

I am not looking for a "well-researched exposition in this area." I'm looking for an essay that states baldly things such as "They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas." to actually back it up with some cogent argument.

That's not all that much to ask.

Also: Hm... But I think today's social-psych/cognitive research is better than what Aristotle says. That implies that social psych cognitive research backs up what pg wrote, and of course, it does not.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#198

Post by ahoyhere »

pg wrote: post #182
ahoyhere wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some: "Having good ideas is most of writing well." How did you come to this conclusion? Evidence? Citations? Reasoning? "… how much less ideas mattered in speaking than writing" Is this based off just the ONE other speaker you mentioned? Any studies? Have you made a personal study of this yourself? Taken notes? I would like to hear some evidence or argument to back this up. "Being a really good speaker is no…

Ok, let's start from the beginning. You believe it's false that having good ideas is most of writing well. Can you give a counterexample? Can you give an example of an essay you consider to be a good piece of writing, and yet whose author you believe didn't know what he/she was talking about? Present company excepted of course.

The burden of proof is on you. It's your essay. Furthermore, I didn't state that I disagreed… I merely asked you to explain your reasoning. Argument isn't a case of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." You either have a case to make, or you don't. You either have a good reason to hold an opinion, or you don't.

And, as jeremymcanally pointed out, you switched from "good ideas being most of writing well" to asking me to show you writing from an author who didn't know what he was talking about.

That is a pretty epic switcheroo.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#199

Post by ahoyhere »

paulsutter wrote: post #178
ahoyhere wrote: post #85

The whole thesis behind this essay is overly facile. A person who is a bad public speaker -- and admits it -- propounding on The Meaning of Public Speaking, its worth, and comparing it to acting (when he presumably is not, and has never been, an actor), and making all sorts of broad sweeping statements which seem to make sense in the moment the sentence passes into your brain but which, if examined for a moment, do n…

There is something fascinating here. pg's essays seem humble, sober, reasonable, and insightful to me. But several smart people I know have had exactly the opposite reaction. Is this a Myers Briggs thing? (NP vs SJ?) You're obviously a bright person, so your strong negative reaction has me fascinated. 1. Which statements in the essay dont hold up to rational inspection? I liked the essay, but maybe intuitive personal…

For 1. See my comment later when pg asks me to lay out some points and I do so.

For 2. Yes, citations can make you look more authoritative. But here's the thing. I believe pg is falling into a trap that most of us smart people fall into: we believe in our own smartness, and we believe in our own logic, therefore we believe what we think about a subject… regardless of whether we've actually investigated or researched the topic whatsoever.

Here's an example you'll see often on HN: "People still use/pay for x?" or "Hackers don't buy things." For example: porn. Several times I've seen the idea expressed on HN "people can't possibly be making money from porn" or "does anyone still pay for porn?" (Not a genuine question, but implication that of course, nobody does.)

The fact is, the porn industry makes $13 billion a year. Yes, even with the internet and piracy. All it takes to see this is to go to Wikipedia but people don't bother. Because they "know."

There is so much written on the value of public speaking, from greater thinkers than pg and myself. Aristotle wrote a lot of silly things but he was also inarguably a great thinker and the father of rhetoric. He wrote a treatise in 400 bc about the uses of public speaking, which intellectuals throughout the ages have used as one of the cornerstones of a true liberal education.

I'm not saying Aristotle is correct. I'm saying it seems ridiculous for an intellectual with the reach and influence of pg to write bald statements like "So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas" without even a perfunctory investigation of the history of the thing.

Nobody questions it, so I question it.

Actually, the way pg opened the essay -- Having good ideas is most of writing well. -- is actually a technique called "begging the question". Which was dubbed a material fallacy. By Aristotle.

Just sayin'.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#200

Post by pg »

ahoyhere wrote: post #198
pg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's start from the beginning. You believe it's false that having good ideas is most of writing well. Can you give a counterexample? Can you give an example of an essay you consider to be a good piece of writing, and yet whose author you believe didn't know what he/she was talking about? Present company excepted of course.

The burden of proof is on you. It's your essay. Furthermore, I didn't state that I disagreed… I merely asked you to explain your reasoning. Argument isn't a case of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." You either have a case to make, or you don't. You either have a good reason to hold an opinion, or you don't. And, as jeremymcanally pointed out, you switched from "good ideas being most of writing well" to askin…

On the contrary. I asked you to give me an example of something I wrote that you believe to be false. You gave me that sentence. The burden of proof is on you.

Just so we're clear, do you believe it's false that having good ideas is most of writing well? Or not?

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