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Writing and Speaking

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writing and Speaking

#51

Post by oskarth »

> That may be what public speaking is really for. It's probably what it was originally for.

What is pg referring to here? Originally public speaking was the only source of transmitting information in general, and before Gutenberg probably the most common one.

On a more practical level, replacing um with silence is a simple way of making it a lot more enjoyable to listen to. Easier said than done, but I imagine it's quite a small investment for someone who does a lot of public speaking.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#52

Post by projektx »

Regarding Note #4, I've noticed that the Qty=10 number seems to hold true, maybe its closer to 7. I also think it scales in organizations. How many industries are dominated by 5 to 10 players? Aerospace, Automobiles, Banking, Media are a few that come to mind right away. To bring it back to interpersonal communications, I can manage about 7 people very effectively, when I get much beyond that I starting thinking about someone running interference for me. If I knew anything about the way military organization works, or had ever taken a college level management course, I'd know how I'm stating some rule of thumb most everyone but me knows about already. I do enjoy reading your essays Paul.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#53

Post by mhartl »

Eliminating the "ums" would lend an amount of polish disproportionate to the required effort. A friend once told me about a trick she learned from a course in public speaking: every time a student speaker said "um", the entire class would chant "um!" in response. With that kind of instant feedback, speakers quickly learned to pause silently instead of filling the space with sound. You could try this technique with a practice audience, or—if you were feeling really bold—even with a real one.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#54

Post by carguy1983 »

gruseom wrote: post #31

I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at is actually not very funny. Most people wouldn't normally laugh at the same things, unless they were really nervous. No doubt social proof is a big part of this: people laugh because others are laughing, as the essay says. Audiences are their own laugh track. But something has to start the ball rolling. I wonder if it's related to authority.…

I've noticed this too - when speaking in front of my employees, they laugh at the strangest things - things that would not be funny if I said them at, for example, lunch.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#55

Post by o1iver »

pg wrote: post #41
o1iver wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then he should have said that and not tried to argue that people who can speak cannot think!

Can you tell me the sentence where I claimed that?

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 tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better."

I know quite a few people who are great thinkers and great speakers and maybe that is why I found the article a bit offensive in that regard.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#56

Post by apl »

pg wrote: post #41
o1iver wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then he should have said that and not tried to argue that people who can speak cannot think!

Can you tell me the sentence where I claimed that?

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 reading of this section is "I've observed a correlation between vacuousness and effective rhetoric." What I (and presumably others) gathered is "Clarity of thought and rhetoric ability, pick one." Both seem either misguided or wrong.

I'll go ahead and assume that you're simply offering the passage as an anecdote. In that case, however, you're doing what you condemn -- rhetorics over conceptual purity and ideas. Can you elaborate a little?

Re: Writing and Speaking

#58

Post by edw519 »

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 comedy clubs because so many people howl at stuff I think is lame.

On the other hand, I find tech talks that would bore my friends to death incredibly interesting. I've seen pg speak several times and I really enjoyed his talks. I even like the "ums". They tell my subconscious to pay attention because I'm being treated to something real-time and genuine that has never happened before and may never happen again.

Oddly, my favorite tech speaker in the past few years was Reid Hoffman. He sure doesn't look like a professional speaker; he paced back and forth and mumbled with his head down. But I was afraid that if I dropped my pencil, I might miss something that could change my life. Now that's what I call a good speaker.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#59

Post by ry0ohki »

neilk wrote: post #44

pg, I may be alone in this, but I think your talks, even when read out verbatim, have an extra dimension that is missing in your essays. When you speak, your curiosity and sense of humor come through strongly. You like to use writing to explore radical new ideas, and to this end, you refine your essays to have as few qualifications as possible. On the page it sometimes comes off as arrogant. But with your voice, I ca…

I agree 100%. I used to feel the exact way about Paul's writing (it seemed arrogant), then I heard him in person and from that point on always had a different and much more positive impression of him.

Paul is right that being a good speaker is not about making your ideas better, but I don't think being a good writer is much different (perhaps the bar is lower since it's not live, and there are less judgements to be made of the person themselves), to be a good writer or a good speaker you need to be able to keep people interested and convey ideas clearly.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#60

Post by davidw »

To me it seems like it's worth picking the low hanging fruit in terms of improving - ditching the 'um' thing, for instance. That's likely something you or most anyone can do at not too great a cost.
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