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Writing and Speaking

paulgraham.com

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Re: Writing and Speaking

#61

Post by snth »

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…

"...whisper ... slightly inaudible, less clear... strange accent..."

How terrible. This reminds me of so many boring, unclear, tortuous talks by grad students and faculty.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#62

Post by erikpukinskis »

My guess is that ideas "get you farther" in writing because you have the freedom to ditch vast swaths of your audience as you go, and only carry on with your hardcore fans to the end.

In a talk, you have a fixed roomful of people... an arbitrary, if somewhat self-selected group. It's much harder to keep 300 people glued to their seat in an auditorium than it is to bring 300 people to your last paragraph, of the 5000 who clicked through your online essay.

I think it's a great challenge, and in many ways requires BETTER ideas. It requires you to actually say something that really matters, and that anyone can see really matters. With writing you can get away with pandering to your base.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#63

Post by bdunbar »

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'm not shining on you when I say this [1]: you are a good public speaker [2].

Perhaps not the best, but you're clearly better than a majority of guys who get up and try it.

Luckily, the 'um' thing is easily licked. When you catch your self saying 'um', don't. Don't say anything. Insert a pause, and carry on.

You _feel_ like you're taking forever, that we're out in the audience wondering why you're staring with a vacant look on your face like a slack-jawed yokel.

You're not. The audience doesn't even _notice_.

And you don't even have to sacrifice any thinking mojo to do this.

[1] No reason to. I'll never submit a pitch to ycombinator [3].

[2] Never seen you in person - but I've watched some videos.

[3] Unless the rules are drastically changed.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#64

Post by pg »

apl wrote: post #50
pg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be attributing to me a lot of beliefs I don't hold. Can you give examples of any specific sentences or passages I wrote that you believe to be false?

Two key passages: > Having good ideas is most of writing well. Disagreed. Written style matters, and whenever it doesn't matter, neither would it matter in spoken form. Your writing style happens to be lean, concise, reduced. But that doesn't just happen -- or are all your essays first drafts? Would they work as well in flowery prose? > (...) it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered > in speaking than w…

See what a useful exercise it is to look at the actual sentences I wrote? Gone are the claims that I consider the extra things you can do in a talk "mere baggage" (I said the opposite in the last paragraph) and that "essays are baggage-free" (I said the opposite in the 8th paragraph). Now all I'm being accused of is claiming that having good ideas is most of writing well, and that it is a smaller component of speaking well than writing well.

Frankly these seem such commonplace claims that I think more people would accuse me of wasting the reader's time with platitudes than saying things that are false.

For the sake of completeness I'll defend them anyway:

1. You can't explain something clearly if you don't understand it yourself. Your writing may be fine at the phonetic level, but you won't for example be able to use any metaphors. Your audience will feel like they're being driven in a Ferrari over ploughed fields.

2. Who is generally considered to be better able to cause people to believe mistaken ideas, speakers or writers? When you imagine a demagogue, for example, do you imagine someone speaking before an audience or sitting at a desk writing?

Re: Writing and Speaking

#66

Post by Jach »

cperciva wrote: post #19
pg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse. (I said in the first paragraph that I wished I were a better speaker. Why would I wish for that if I thought it made your ideas worse?) It's just alarming to me how little being a better speaker depends on making your ideas better.

Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse. I must have gotten the wrong message from that essay. It seemed to me that from about the third paragraph onwards you were itemizing the bad things about good speakers.

For me it read like this: pg wants to become a better speaker, i.e. one who is able to better convey better ideas. But the notion of a Good Speaker that is trotted out as the ideal to strive for at places like, I presume, toastmasters et al., is just a particular kind of speaker that has hijacked the "good" qualifier.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#67

Post by Cherian_Abraham »

I write fairly well, and I doubt if I could say the same about on stage. I have to have aids to sum up my thoughts beforehand, and even then I tend to ramble.

When I write, I almost always have a clear train of thought much ahead, that I take my reader along for. I can afford to fork at times, where as on stage this runs the risk of alienating the audience or losing them completely.

I tend to go back and edit a number of times before I publish. Almost always something I feel is a cogent explanation comes across less so, at a later read.

None of these, I am able to do when I am on stage. I have to keep pushing ahead and if I ramble, if I lose my train of thought, then I have to at times jump a few stops to get back on track. And by then, the punch line that I had in waiting is almost always half so effective.

And even from the reader/listeners perspective, though a speech has the rare opportunity to evoke the strongest of emotions, I find it more so in the case of written word. With a page of text, there is more clarity, less noise, its just you and lines of clear text, reader to the author. With a speech, the second time is almost always less effective, the tone may be monotonous, the visual medium almost always brings along other noise, which combined steals the clarity of thought.

Re: Writing and Speaking

#69

Post by krishna2 »

Minor sugg: s/better start/better to start/

In the sentence: "If you want to engage an audience it's better start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences.".

Re: Writing and Speaking

#70

Post by pg »

o1iver wrote: post #55
pg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. I think we both agree on that. Or do you think any of the sentences I actually wrote are false?

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