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Writing and Speaking

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writing and Speaking

#221

Post by hef19898 »

pg wrote: post #202
plinkplonk wrote: post #190

@pg, What do you think about the idea that good teaching involves good 'public speaking' skills and 'stage presence'? Prof Lewin of MIT for example seems to be an extremely effective teacher. People do seem to need lectures (even if in a video form) in addition to books and papers to learn maximally, even when what is being learned is science or engineering. (I understand that teaching is about conveying existing ide…

It's an interesting question whether lectures are necessary. I've heard universities are moving away from them. It's obvious why you want a human teaching a small class; that's a conversation, not a talk. But is there a benefit to lectures too large to be conversational besides the two that I listed (meeting the speaker and motivating people)? It was a while ago, but I can't remember a lot of lectures from college or…

This week-end my father, a pretty good teacher for photography, and I, currently teaching something completely different from time to time, had an discussion on teaching. For me, the main difference between a speach a teaching is flexibility. During a speach, people are listening, but there's hardly any interaction. Teaching is more of a interaction with people. My standpoint is that teaching more or less means having people thinking about something and learn. A speach can, and should, motivate people to think about the message. But they can live pretty well without one. In order to teach well, you have to adopt to your pupils on a almost individual basis. Some have to read something to get it, others have to hear it while again others have to see or do it themselves. I guess thats why big classes tend to be that bad for learning progress.

Commin g back to topic / speaches: you have to differentiate the message from the messenger. There are alot of examples of damn good speekers with bad messages, usually with very bad out-comes.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#222

Post by nodemaker »

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…

>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"

Totally agree.

One thing that I have observed in many social activities especially public speaking and sports is that how good you are heavily depends upon how good you think you are.

Interestingly perhaps the converse is true with respect to creative (non-social) activities like writing and programming.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#223

Post by ABS »

sberkun12 wrote: post #109
ABS wrote: post #4

would be great to get Scott Berkun opinion on this (I enjoyed his "Confessions of a Public Speaker" http://www.speakerconfessions.com/ )

ABS: your wish is my command: On Speaking vs. Writing: http://t.co/SYOqGZfm

awesome, thanks!

Re: Writing and Speaking

#224

Post by hef19898 »

Maybe the issue is that its rare for an audiance of a speach to make the difference between the way the content is communicated and the content itself. Agreed, in a speach the way is the raison-d'être. But when you are good in writting, which I'm not, I guess it can ruin your day in a speach that you are unable to transport your message as you are used to in an essay. If pg meant that in his essay, I agree that the idea counts less in a speach than it does in an essay. But you could well make the same point in a speach about essays, if you get what I mean. P.S.: Apparently, I'm even worse in writing as I thought...

Re: Writing and Speaking

#226

Post by justincormack »

randall wrote: post #103
paul wrote: post #98

Speaking and writing are more different than they seem. It's actually a different medium, and so a transcript of a great speech will often seem weak, just as a reading of a great essay may seem flat. Too much is lost in translation, which I think may the problem PG is encountering -- he first writes an essay and then translates it into a speech. Imagine a painter who creates a great painting and then tries to transla…

I like to think of it in terms of communication bandwidth. The written word is low bandwidth, but if executed well, theoretically the ideas can be consumed more succinctly. Radio would be the next step up the spectrum, adding implied emotion into each word. Video is next, and it's what I actually care about. I think if done correctly, like a really thorough, honest, well reported 60 minutes piece for instance, you ge…

Radio and video may add to speech but bandwidth wise if it is just the words reading is so much faster that you have to add a vast amount to compete...

Re: Writing and Speaking

#227

Post by philwelch »

jwco wrote: post #170
pg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your last paragraph about Zidane is interesting. Keeping possession is a bigger tactical advantage than many people previously thought. Imagine an entire team playing keep-away for the win, patiently building up to goals confident they will get them, and you essentially have Barcelona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6A_K8oWqfk

Zidane was more of an attacking midfielder, which makes his contributions all the more obvious, but even Zidane himself knew that the core of a great team was as far back as the often unheralded position of defensive midfield. When his club Real Madrid sold Claude Makelele and bought David Beckham, Zidane remarked, "Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?"

Despite the presence of more heralded players like Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi, Busquets is likewise the tactical centerpiece of Barcelona, almost purely due to his intelligence on the pitch. In defense, he drops back and positions himself to intercept passes rather than challenging for the ball, and once he has it he almost always makes the right decision where to put it next. And when Barcelona have possession, he pushes forward to form a triangle with the rest of the midfield, providing an open outlet to maintain possession and recycle it. If you chart out the passes Barcelona make in a typical match, there's usually a very heavy triangle between Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets.

The most interesting part of Barcelona's tactic, though, is the way they seem to push even more players into the midfield. Their notional striker is Messi, but in his "false nine" role he plays closer to attacking midfield. Likewise, Barcelona's defenders push forward and hold a very high line. Defensive midfielders like Mascherano and even Busquets have been repurposed to play as central defenders, while Pique can make effective runs forward. Right-back Dani Alves usually rushes forward to play as a winger.

The interesting thing about Barcelona's style of play is that, while it's obviously a tactic well suited for a team full of good passers who have played with each other mostly since childhood, it can be surprisingly effective for other teams. Swansea have used it very effectively in the Premier League this season, while Borussia Mönchengladbach have gone from near-relegation to the Champions League places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAx9kYx8qo4

Re: Writing and Speaking

#228

Post by tissarah »

pg wrote: post #70
o1iver wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't say that per se, but I felt it in the undertone of the whole essay. See some of these sentences: "As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much." "Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction." "But here again there's a…

I try to make the strongest claims I can that are true. If I believed something as extreme as what you claim I said, I'd say it. Which means if I didn't say it, I didn't say it. Though the difference in meaning between what you claim I said and what you're able to quote me as saying may seem small to you, there is a critical difference between them: what you claim I said is false, and the sentences you quote are true…

Here is an important tradeoff between speaking and writing. Writing allows the user more room to color the information with their own experiences. For example the words "a very long time" conjures up some concept for a reader -- but when a listener hears "a very long time" from an old person versus a young person they may hear those as two different things. It's important and possibly absent information here that "if [you] didn't say it, [you] didn't say it." Inference is an incredibly powerful tool of persuasion and used often.

Gesture, tone, emphasis, etc... can give an incredible amount of information that people may process quickly and easily. It may alleviate some confusion created by the readers personal interpretation of words.

I think this thread well covers benefits and drawbacks of written versus spoken word. For me, I think of it like I think of various technologies available for a project. There are different tradeoffs and I must consider what I am trying to accomplish, what the pain points are going to be, who my users are, what is available, and make a careful choice.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#229

Post by pmjordan »

pg wrote: post #202
plinkplonk wrote: post #190

@pg, What do you think about the idea that good teaching involves good 'public speaking' skills and 'stage presence'? Prof Lewin of MIT for example seems to be an extremely effective teacher. People do seem to need lectures (even if in a video form) in addition to books and papers to learn maximally, even when what is being learned is science or engineering. (I understand that teaching is about conveying existing ide…

It's an interesting question whether lectures are necessary. I've heard universities are moving away from them. It's obvious why you want a human teaching a small class; that's a conversation, not a talk. But is there a benefit to lectures too large to be conversational besides the two that I listed (meeting the speaker and motivating people)? It was a while ago, but I can't remember a lot of lectures from college or…

I think the effectiveness of lectures might depend on the student as much as the lecturer.

I can remember some lectures (6-10 years ago) and their content quite vividly, even if they were fairly unidirectional and to large audiences. I find that if I start looking up something that was explained in a lecture, it will trigger the memory of the lecture, even if I couldn't recall it previously. This almost never happens for things I learned from books or the internet - if I've forgotten them, I have to relearn them. It also seems to take me much longer to understand something from a written explanation.[1]

I can only assume it's to do with multi-sensory input having easier access to long-term memory. And maybe there's an emotional element, too: reading a (factual) book is an emotionally neutral experience. That's not the case when you're watching and listening to a human.

And I'm sure the effect is more pronounced in some than in others. Many other students in my year did very well despite missing lots of lectures; I think I missed about 5 of what must have been about 2000 and would have needed to do vastly more revision to pass exams. I suspect I would have dropped out of university if it hadn't been for lectures. As it turns out, I had essentially zero intrinsic passion for my subject (physics), but the good lecturers made it interesting.

[1] I realise this is anecdotal and hard to verify. The most direct comparison I can think of is this: I remember that when trying to catch up after a lecture I missed, it took me much longer than the 50 minutes to understand the covered subject matter using the blackboard notes and reference books.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#230

Post by apu »

pg wrote: post #202
plinkplonk wrote: post #190

@pg, What do you think about the idea that good teaching involves good 'public speaking' skills and 'stage presence'? Prof Lewin of MIT for example seems to be an extremely effective teacher. People do seem to need lectures (even if in a video form) in addition to books and papers to learn maximally, even when what is being learned is science or engineering. (I understand that teaching is about conveying existing ide…

It's an interesting question whether lectures are necessary. I've heard universities are moving away from them. It's obvious why you want a human teaching a small class; that's a conversation, not a talk. But is there a benefit to lectures too large to be conversational besides the two that I listed (meeting the speaker and motivating people)? It was a while ago, but I can't remember a lot of lectures from college or…

Two important components of lectures are

1. Tying facts and ideas together in a cohesive "story" so that it sticks better in people's minds. Good books are supposed to do this too, but sometimes you don't have the flexibility to choose the best books. Also, as in any story, you have high points and low; important bits and those less so. Emphasizing these differences and making sure students understand which are the central points is another main goal of good lectures.

2. Explaining difficult concepts in different (often multiple) ways so that people can understand them better. For various reasons, books have a tendency to avoid "intuitive" explanations for many concepts, perhaps out of a fear of not-quite-perfect analogies. Such analogies can be given in class with the appropriate qualifications; doing the same in a book would often require excessive legalese.

Where appropriate, these explanations often involve visual elements -- animations usually, and not just pictures (which you can of course include in books).

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