
Writing and Speaking - tlammens
http://paulgraham.com/speak.html
======
apl
It's a bit too easy and somewhat condescending to brush off public speaking as
strictly inferior to written communication. In fact, I disagree strongly with
Graham's stance. Sure, pure information transmission is enhanced in written
form: there's less noise, the reader can skip and backtrack at will, and so
on.

Speaking, however, gives you many more channels, and I refuse to consider
these channels (inflection, speed, choice of words, prosody, emotionalization,
what have you) mere baggage. Also, it's deceiving to propose that essays are
baggage-free. Good style makes a huge difference, even in writing. Compare the
great essayists to lowly part-time bloggers: the difference rarely boils down
to just _ideas_. Delivery matters. Emotional content, something Graham appears
to see as noise, distorts and enhances in written and spoken form alike.

All in all, I find it a bit too convenient that a mediocre speaker and good
essayist happens to think writing is simply the better medium.

~~~
ThomPete
Derrida thought a whole lot about the spoken word vs. writing.

 _According to logocentrist theory, speech is the original signifier of
meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written
word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism asserts that
language originates as a process of thought that produces speech, and it
asserts that speech produces writing._

<http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/derrida.html>

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
drostie
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.

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

------
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.

~~~
jonnathanson
_"I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the
audience."_

I agree with most of your post. But I'd actually invert that relationship. A
good speaker is someone who understands his audience, so that he can maximize
both his connection to it and his impact upon it.

The intent of speaking, and the intent of writing, aren't altogether
different. In either case, a typical goal is to convey information to an
audience, and to maximize the audience's uptake of that information. Uptake
naturally follows from conveyance, and successful conveyence depends upon
successful connection (or "breakthrough"). So, it stands to reason, knowing
one's audience is a necessary precondition to engaging one's audience. Some
audiences are tougher to engage than others. And what necessarily breaks
through for Audience A may fly right over the heads of Audience B, or piss off
Audience C, or strike Audience D as a joke.

This distinction is important to make, because too many people write or speak
primarily for themselves. They assume a hypothetical audience of likeminded
people, and they blame the audience when their words don't hit their marks.
This mindset is so prevalent that the exclamation "Tough crowd!" has become
something of a cliche. It's true that some crowds are "tougher" than others,
but the failure to engage a particular crowd usually lies mainly with the
speaker or writer. (Even when it doesn't, it's best to assume it does;
assumption of failure provides a useful lesson, whereas blame deferral offers
no room for growth).

~~~
Spearchucker
Understanding the audience, as you suggest, is not, in my experience, what
makes for a good speaker.

I've spoken in front of audiences - large and small - more times than I can
remember. Some of my talks tanked. Badly.

Most go really, really well. And the difference between the tankers and the
good ones is one thing - a belief in what I'm saying.

It can (and often has been) an openly hostile audience (I've had people
unexpectedly sit in just because I was "the guy from Microsoft", and that
presented them with a rare opportunity to heckle). And most times I win those
over as easily as the ones that are open to what I have to say to begin with.

And it's quite simply that when you believe in your message, when you just
know you're right/your approach is right/your message has integrity, that you
appear authentic.

And authenticity is very compelling, as a speaker.

~~~
jonnathanson
What you're saying and what I'm saying are not mutually exclusive.
Authenticity should always be a goal. Belief in one's own words, likewise, is
a solid precondition to success. All of these things are factors in success,
as is knowing the audience. It's possible to make a successful speech without
achieving any or all of these factors, but achieving them makes success much
more likely. It makes the delivery of the speech less of a dice roll.

I didn't mean to suggest a reductionism in favor of one factor over all
others; I was simply replying to a statement in the grandparent comment about
the relationship between audience and speaker. (Also, I'm not suggesting that
one should pander to his audience).

~~~
Spearchucker
That's fair enough.

------
cperciva
I wouldn't say that I'm a _good_ speaker, but I'm certainly a much better
speaker than I used to be. It's not just about transmitting a certain number
of bits of information per minute; it's also about making sure that those bits
are being received at the other end. I often throw jokes (and quasi-jokes,
like my "purpose of cryptography is to force the US government to torture you"
line) into talks as a way to help keep the audience's attention; and I watch
the audience for signs that I'm moving too fast or too slow for them.

But for all of this, I don't think the material I convey has suffered in the
slightest. One audience member told me that my cryptography-in-one-hour talk
was the "most densely packed hour of information" he had ever seen. If being a
good speaker pushed me away from having and conveying good ideas, my talks
should have been getting progressively less informative, not more so.

I posit that while PG is seeing a real effect, it's not the effect he thinks
he's seeing. Rather than style detracting from substance, it seems to me that
there's selection bias: In order to be invited to give talks, you must have at
least one of {good ideas, good style}. As a result, those talks which are
completely devoid of interesting ideas are inevitably given very well -- we
never see talks which are given by poor speakers who have no interesting
ideas. This in no way means that speaking well is responsible for the lack of
substance.

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
solipsist

      Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse.
    

In your essay, you say:

    
    
      Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in
      many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.
    

Paraphrasing the above passage, "being a really good speaker ... pushes you in
the opposite direction [of having good ideas]".

These two statements seems to be in direct contradiction of each other.

~~~
pg
No. It just means you have to expend extra effort.

~~~
solipsist
This is interesting. So you think that being a good speaker negatively impacts
one's ideas, although it won't necessarily be noticeable to others? That is
because those who are good speakers have counteracted the negative impact with
more practice.

------
paul
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 translate it directly into music --
will he be frustrated by the limitations of the medium?

To me, the power of speaking is that it temporarily creates a shared reality
where the listener can actually be in the mind of the speaker. Several people
here have mentioned hearing PG speak and finally understanding the sense of
curiosity that produces so many of his ideas. Maybe the idea itself isn't
quite as clear, but the inspiration that lead to the idea is more obvious, and
that's often just as important (teach a man to fish...).

~~~
randall
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 get closer to being in the mind of the subject than you do in any other
medium. Hearing someone say a quote, while watching them squirm (Clinton,
Gates, etc.) give you a good idea of who someone is better than any other
situation, except public speaking / one-on-one convos.

Web video isn't really doing a good job of this yet, and I think it's related
to PG's idea that the writer of a script should spend all his/her time making
the ideas better, while the actor can focus on the presentation layer.

If it were easier / had a shorter feedback loop to author the presentation /
video layer, and the content layer were what was taking up the majority of the
time, we could see more interesting video. Right now, the render / capture /
upload / publish loop is so long, that it's just too difficult to meaningfully
experiment in video as information, as opposed to video as entertainment,
which is why YouTube's success has a foundation of quick funny bits, and not
some informational underpinning.

~~~
dan00
"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."

I don't think there's a difference in bandwidth, but that an essay can use the
whole bandwidth for words (ideas) and in a speech the bandwidth has to be
shared by words (ideas), acoustics and visuals.

------
rubidium
PG walks around at the end of his article, but doesn't say it outright.

Giving talks is about leading. Be it rallying the staff, conveying a vision,
or providing an update, the main thing is to inspire, connect, motivate and
direct. Some very self-motivated people hate talks because they already have
what they need in that area and would prefer just a document of instructions.
Most people, however, appreciate good leadership and appreciate talks.

Talks are for implementing ideas. Conversation is for understanding and
generating ideas. Writing/thinking is for generating ideas.

------
kevinalexbrown
False modesty aside, I am a very good public speaker. Doing debate in high
school, I had an undefeated regular season, as in not losing a single round. I
say this just to point out that I'm not a mediocre public speaker championing
the written word.

Paul Graham is right, but it depends more on context than he suggests:

Speaking about a technical subject, you want to communicate the ideas
themselves. The emotional content in this case _is_ noise. Paul suggests in
the notes that academic talks are more immune to this, but having been to
quite a few academic talks and given a few myself, I still find them quite
inferior to written papers and one-on-one conversations. True, people can
still inject the emotional appeals in papers or conversations, but they tend
to get more easily noticed and filtered by the reader or listener without the
spellbound effect.

Political debates are perhaps an exception. When you watch a presidential
debate, you're not only looking for the president with the best ideas, but a
president you believe has the leadership capacity to carry them out. You might
personally want the president who has the best ideas, regardless of how
charming they appear on camera, but like it or not, a lot of that leadership
rests on personal charisma.

~~~
rshe
This may be particular to the field of biology, but I find biology talks to be
much more interesting than papers. One contributing factor is that important
papers in Science and Nature are subject to stringent length limitations. This
limits the writer's ability to unfurl a coherent narrative. Oftentimes, years
of research are condensed into a handful of figures and sentences that cannot
convey the more subtle points of the argument (for that the reader is directed
to the supplementary information, which is often many times longer than the
actual paper).

On a more macroscopic scale, talks also allow scientists to highlight deeper
themes that are often lost in the minutiae of a technical paper. This is
especially important in biology because we want to find universal paradigms
from experiments done on model organisms. A talented speaker can distill the
most important themes from a body of research in a way that writing rarely
achieves.

In summary, talks are a great medium for conveying conceptual narratives. In
biology talks, the important assertions are almost always backed up by a slide
that shows real data. However, if I am an expert in a particular subfield and
really want to get into the details, of course I'll go read the paper.

~~~
madhadron
As someone who's passed as a native in physics, biology, compsci, and math,
this is peculiar to biology, or rather to the culture of academic biology
today, where the laurels go to those who can make the biggest mountain out of
their molehill of data. Thus you have grand assertions, followed by a slide
with a dozen gels, half of which are blurred, which show that under some very
strenuous assumptions and some very particular conditions, something might be
a certain way if you squint hard enough.

Journal length limits are partially responsible for the culture of bad writing
in academic biology, but it cannot explain why most of my colleagues in
biology could not express technical ideas clearly in writing even without
length limits.

If you go to the older literature you will find papers much clearer than any
biology talk I've heard. Arthur Koch's papers on cell shape are good examples.
There was also a culture of monographs that is missing today. The best
examples I can think of off the top of my head are one by Henrici
(<http://www.archive.org/details/morphologicvaria00henr>) and Schrodinger's
'What is life?'(whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf ) are the
two examples that occur to me off the top of my head, or Chargaff's scientific
essays in 'Heraclitean Fire'.

Disclaimer: I loathe the culture of academic biology and believe that most of
its practitioners should be defunded in favor of serious biological research.

~~~
rshe
I have to disagree with your characterization of modern biology. I was more
trying to make a point on the information value of talks versus papers. Your
comment reminds me a frequent quarrel at my school on how math is superior to
physics, which is superior to bio/chem. Of course everything in the humanities
is "worthless." I don't what to attribute to you beliefs that you don't hold,
but this is the undercurrent that I'm feeling: <http://xkcd.com/435/>

I do think there are many great papers coming out in biology today, and
scientists are still fully capable of writing insightful books and essays for
the general public. I can see why some papers feel like a collection of
trivial data, but trust me, beautiful and convincing data is well appreciated.
While exaggeration of results is also a problem, we are trained to read all
papers with a critical eye. There are always good papers and bad, but here are
some links to ones that I think are good:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6715/full/397168a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6715/full/397168a0.html?free=2)
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/abs/nature03...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/abs/nature03991.html)
<http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(09)00963-5>
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/807.abstract> (Hopefully you'll be
able to access these - if not, that's a whole nother problem about academic
papers)

I won't comment too much on your generalizations, but I want to note that it
is hard to predict a priori which findings from academic research will become
useful for industry later on. I think you'll find defunding academic biology
to be a pretty unpopular viewpoint. Perhaps you could elaborate on what
serious biological research means? (Plus, I'd say paying graduate students
30k/yr is a pretty efficient labor force)

------
rabble
It feels to me that PG is simply making excuses for not preparing for his
talks. There is no reason technical talks can't be fun, engaging, and full of
information. If you only read it out loud once, you're not doing enough prep.
Sure you could do a funny talk, which sounds great and doesn't have substance.
But it's not a zero sum game.

Don't read your talk out once, read it outloud a dozen times. Don't present it
unpracticed infront of the conference hall, present it in front of friends /
coworkers first.

Speaking and writing, the two, are a major way that programmers get to be
known. It's important that we learn to communicate clearly in an engaging way
with our community. If you're having trouble, take a monologue class at your
local theater.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
I totally agree with you.

One of the most amazing things you see when people is bad at something is how
they make excuses so they don't have to do the work. I have cached myself so
many times making excuses. We tend to distort our world with fantasies.

This is like the people that are bad at meeting women, instead of admitting it
and do something about it, they create excuses like "women love bad boy
bastards, so because I want to be a good boy I don't want to meet women",in
reality is more like "I don't want to accept that maybe just maybe they do
something better than me I can learn from".

In Paul case it is "I don't want to learn to do better speeches so I invent
the excuse: Doing better speeches will mean I will be a worse writer so I
don't want to do it"

When you admit it is a temporal issue, when you are in denial it is permanent.

Could you tell me those speeches are devoid of content?:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V57lotnKGF8>

------
Aloisius
I think pg seems to have confused great speakers with great entertainers. The
mark of a great speaker is one who conveys complex ideas with (apparent) ease,
not simply one who engages and entertains the audience. While those qualities
are certainly helpful, unless the audience comes away with some level of
understanding, in my opinion, the speaker has failed.

A great speaker distills ideas and arguments down to their core essence so
they can be easily absorbed. While, in the speaker, this may not be a source
for ideas, it should be a catalyst of ideas for the listener. In this, the
speaking is superior to that of the written word. This is especially true if
you are in a room full of people who approach you after when it could quickly
turn out to be a source of ideas for the speaker as well.

Further, all the issues pg seems to have with speaking could just as easily be
applied to writing. I have read more nonsensical fluff wrapped up in a
entertaining package than I care to admit. The written word is just as
powerful at selling snake oil as the spoken one.

The only talks I find useless are for subjects I know well. However I have
seen some fantastic talks on topics that I knew nothing about which sparked
ideas I would not have had otherwise. I have given talks that have likewise
provoked a lot of discussion which helped me refine my own ideas.

Maybe pg is just going to (or giving) the wrong talks. Or maybe he
underestimates how good of a speaker he is.

------
coffeemug
I've learned that there is a difference between being a good speaker and being
a polished speaker. PG isn't very polished - there are tons of uhms and some
inherent awkwardness to his talks, but I still consider him a very good
speaker. With his awkwardness on stage comes some natural sense of charisma.
The audience laughs, feels engaged, and is glued to the speaker wondering with
anticipation what he's going to say next. At the end, everybody is very happy
for having heard the talk, and I don't think anyone ever feels bored during
it.

I expect with a few lessons it would be fairly easy to add polish to those
talks if it becomes necessary (e.g. running for office, etc.)

~~~
jmadsen
Yes to your first sentence; I'm not sure about the rest.

I couldn't help but feel this essay was in response to an earlier HN thread
where his speaking style was criticized a bit for its unpolished nature &
being essentially "un-listenable to" on a podcast somewhere.

IF that is the case, then he seems to have missed the point that no matter how
much good content you have, if you are so unpolished that you can't deliver
the message effectively, you almost may as well not talk.

"no one, uhm, is, uhm, going to, uhm, sit still for, uhm, and hour and a half,
of, uhm..."

------
ckuehne
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 it better to whisper, not
shout. Better to slightly unaudible, less clear. Acquire a strange accent. One
should make the audience work to listen, and switch to intellectual overdrive.
(In spite of these rules of thumb by the conference industry, there is no
evidence that demand for a speaker is linked to the TV-announcer quality of
his lecturing). And the most powerful, at a large gathering, tends to be the
one with enough self-control to avoid raising his voice to be noticed, and
make others listen to him."

~~~
simonw
One of my favourite perks when I worked at the Guardian is that any employee
can go along to the morning editorial meetings. They were absolutely
fascinating - a 40 minute meeting where the editorial direction for the day's
newspaper is fleshed out, by an extremely smart and well informed group of
people, with absolutely nothing dumbed down.

One of the thing that really struck me about those meetings was how Alan
Rusbridger, the newspaper's editor, set the tone. He has a relatively quiet
voice, and as a result the room stayed quiet enough that you could almost hear
a pin drop. When he spoke, everyone listened intently. This influenced the
whole meeting - people never spoke over each other, everyone paid full
attention and a huge amount of information and discussion was covered
effectively in a very short space of time.

~~~
chubot
I call this the "Godfather" demeanor. It's common among powerful males. I once
read an article about a big gang leader in prison and the writer noticed that
he had to lean forward to hear what the leader was saying.

They will talk very quietly and unclearly without regard to whether you can
hear them or not. When the room is silent and everybody is listening intently,
you can't help but think that what they have to say is very important. More so
than if they were to speak loudly and solicitously.

It's interesting that Talib is consciously advocating this affectation.

I guess there is a certain kind of leader who gains credibility through
actions rather than speech. Some leaders try to rouse you through speech --
e.g. Barack Obama definitely leans on his oratorial skills. Others do the
opposite -- Larry Page for example. He mumbles, and he doesn't care to repeat
himself. It's everyone else's job to figure out what he's saying.

------
vgm
The following was a real eye-opener for me, as I always thought from someone's
speech, you could infer how much mental horsepower they had [1]:

"

"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in
1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions
(1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not
prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone
cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic
French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go
back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask
me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old
days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun
and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that
sort of performance."

We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion
somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write
like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

"

[1] Foreword, The Quotable Hitchens.

------
neilk
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 can hear you proposing
these ideas for the sheer delight of a new perspective... the tone says "what
if we thought about it this way?"

Also, I'd like to slightly disagree that when one is in an audience, one's
critical thinking goes down. It's a matter of knowing how to focus your
attention. When I watch someone speak, I'm looking for the unintentional parts
as much as the intentional. Where does the person smile and feel relaxed?
Where do they seem stressed? What's their body language saying? For a geek
metaphor, think of that part in Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ where he
describes how certain people have the ability to "condense fact from the vapor
of nuance". This gives a whole other channel of information to engage your
analytical mind, so watching a speech can become like reading.

~~~
ry0ohki
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.

------
andrewacove
I find it interesting to contrast this to the requirements for the YC
application video:

 _Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as
you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still,
text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good
enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than
you gain from a more polished message._

Footnote 2 seems relevant. I'd guess that most YC application videos are also
made of spolia.

------
dctoedt
My late senior partner was a world-famous (in our field) speaker and writer
and leader. He'd be 88 years old now. He was old-fashioned in many ways, and
insisted on telling us newbies exactly how he did public speaking, so that we
could do likewise:

1\. He wrote out every word, _in the type of language he would use in
conversation_. The resulting "script" was double-spaced, with Python-like line
breaks and indentations to signify the pauses he wanted.

2\. Then for rehearsal, he read the entire speech aloud, to himself, _ten
times_ , practicing the cadences and the emphases he wanted, editing as he
went. He said that reading the speech _aloud_ to himself was critical, because
that's what embeds the phrases and cadences and emphases in something like
muscle memory.

He would also sometimes say that Churchill's supposedly-extemporaneous remarks
were the product of enormous polishing and rehearsal.

------
jbellis
I saw Paul speak at the first Startup School in 2005, where he literally read
his talk on stage from an essay he held in his hand. I saw him again at PyCon
2012, and he's improved a lot. But this article makes me think that he still
sees speaking as a kind of poor delivery mechanism for an essay. They're
really different beasts.

I wrote a longer article about what goes into good public speaking for a
technical audience over here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3721333>

------
aristus
I recently read an essay by an advisor to Mario Vargas-Llosa's failed campaign
for the presidency of Peru. Brilliant writer, bad speaker. [0]

Being one of the greatest writers alive, Vargas-Llosa was good at giving voice
to the people's dissatisfaction and ideas for how to solve them. But he failed
at the other half of political communication: repetition. He was always racing
ahead of the electorate, speaking on his latest ideas. He was bored with the
thought of repeating himself. He never developed the habit of the stump
speech, and left his constituents behind.

In the influence game, one is eventually faced with a tradeoff between being a
thinker who raises the upper bound, and being a communicator/popularizer who
raises the median. Thinkers are needed, but if their ideas race too far ahead
they languish until a popularizer takes them up.

There is a middle way: continue your writing as before, but use the stump as a
trailing indicator of your thought process. There is no dishonor in giving
audiences an expanded version of your thoughts as of a few essays ago. Don't
worry that the ideas aren't "new". Definition, then repetition.

Also, learning how to be an engaging speaker at the same time as trying out
new ideas is hard. Keeping the ideas constant can help you become a better
speaker more quickly than you might think. And repeating yourself can even
lead to better thoughts in directions you don't expect.

[0] Mark Malloch Brown, "The Consultant", Granta #36

------
beza1e1
Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do
something.

For example, Steve Jobs keynotes made you go to the Apple Online Store and
preorder the latest products; Bret Victor in his "Inventing on Principle" talk
makes you rant about the current state of IDEs.

The effect of a talk disappears rapidly after the speaker has left the stage.
In contrast, a written text stays.

~~~
padobson
"Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do
something."

I couldn't have put it more succinctly myself.

Motivation is speech's primary function. Getting you to vote, or buy
something, or work harder, or learn something. Everyone who is trying to get a
group of people to do something is using speeches at some point.

------
larrys
This raises an interesting issue of what I will call "the lender" effect.

In an old business where I had to apply for loans I was always in contact with
the bank officer. Never the person who made the decision which the officer
called "the lender". If I got the loan I would hear the "the lender approved"
if not the opposite. "The lender" could have been a person or a group who
knows.

Anyway I remember thinking about that and I came to the conclusion that the
bank may have been purposely separating the person wanting the money from the
person who could make the decision about giving money. Why?

Because (I think) "the lender" just looked (read) at the cold hard facts.
Their opinion of whether to loan money wasn't colored by anything the person
wanting the money said or of course how they appeared.

This more or less goes along with what PG is saying. The question is if this
is the case (and I believe it is based upon years of this happening) it might
explain partly the VC success rate. Since they put much weight on individuals
and teams and not on the idea. Perhaps some of the weight they put on the
teams is colored by rhetoric that they should be removing from the decision
making process. (And yes I know the first thing people do in YC is fill out an
app and then get to pitch.)

------
gruseom
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. The speaker is in an
authoritative position, the audience is subordinate. One thing I learned from
hypnosis is that most of us are a lot more ready to submit to authority than
we seem - far more than we believe we are. If the speaker is known to be
famous or powerful, the audience will automatically project this on to them;
but even if they aren't, all they have to do is just assume a manner of
authority and the audience will automatically project it onto them anyway.
Then just about anything they say that is jovial will seem funny and the
audience will laugh. And I bet if an audience laughs a few times, they go away
saying "that was a good talk".

~~~
bokonist
_I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at
is actually not very funny._

Isn't the very definition of funny is that it makes people laugh? Laughter is
inherently a social, group bonding phenomena. Inherently, a social, group
gathering will have more laughter. There is no such thing as something being
objectively funny, funny only exists inside a group and social context, which
provides the opportunity for the group to bond at someone's expense (possibly
someone inside the group, possibly someone or something outside the group).

~~~
gruseom
Yes. The next sentence was intended to explain what I meant.

------
harri127
A speaker's success is defined on how well they can connect with their
audience and deliver their message in a way that the audience will understand.
People usually enjoy speakers when they are speaking on a topic on which the
people are interested compared to people not being interested when they are
forced to listen to a speaker. The same goes for written communication, you
must connect with your audience and deliver a clear message. The difference
becomes that a writer has the option to edit and change their communication
before communicating with their audience. Either way, successful written or
verbal communication is determined by what our outcomes are for our
communication. If you can communicate your point and influence the audience
then you are a successful.

------
neebz
Never seen someone deride speaking like that.

I think one of the best things about speaking is that it allows you to
emphasize the parts which are important.

The important distinction is in writing you are giving out ideas to the
audience and let them decipher all. But with speaking you get this additional
power using pauses, emphasis etc. to notify the audience what are the
important points and wherethe whole talk/presentation is revolving around.
Maybe PG's audience is very smart most of the time and he just need to float
the ideas and let them measure everything.

And not to forget if the language of communication is not exactly your native
language (or your not that good at it) then your writing could end up making
your whole essay a pile of shit (e.g. this comment ;) )

------
akg
In general I agree with the premise that talks are more about conveying a
vision, illicit emotion, and are prone to mob reactions. However, I wonder how
much of that is changing due to the fact that most talks are now available to
view online. Once you can view talks at your own leisure, you can spend more
time thinking about the speaker's points (via seeking and pausing) and you are
also not susceptible to the reactions of those around you.

I wonder how much the availability of talks in this way affects their content.
I would think that talks are moving more in the direction of writing since the
speakers words can be heard and thought about without external influences --
which in turn can be used to generate new ideas.

~~~
shahan
_> However, I wonder how much of that is changing due to the fact that most
talks are now available to view online._

Interesting point. If ideas, arguments, and claims in video and audio can be
visualized more effectively, that might change things even more.

------
alain94040
I disagree with pg's opinion in that case. I think what he describes is
correct as far as it applies to his style of speaking, but there are many
cases where a speech format conveys information better and is more articulate
than reading an essay. Think of TED talks for instance.

It's ok for any one person to perfer words, but not everyone prefers reading
to a face to face meeting. If that were the case, imagine all the VC pitches
consisting of reviewing business plans rather than live pitches.

Even YC places a lot of emphasis on the 10-minute interview in the selection
process . So there must be something non-verbal happening, otherwise an
exchange of emails would give founders a better opportunity to present the
case for their startup.

~~~
pg
_not everyone prefers reading to a face to face meeting. If that were the
case, imagine all the VC pitches consisting of reviewing business plans rather
than live pitches._

That's the worst counterexample one could choose. The reason investors want to
meet founders in person is precisely because they care as much if not more
about the people than the idea.

------
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.

------
plinkplonk
@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 ideas from one mind to
another vs generating new ones 'at runtime'. I was just interested in what you
think about the need for "public speaking" skills to be a really good
teacher.)

~~~
pg
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
grad school that I found more useful than books. When I try to remember
lectures that I learned things from, what comes to mind is professors writing
on chalkboards, explaining things like what happened in memory when some
program was running or showing what happened when you did something to a
matrix. So perhaps the big advantage of lectures is that they're not just
words-- that they can include visual demonstrations.

~~~
pmjordan
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.

------
xenophanes
The philosopher William Godwin basically said: if you have any criticism of my
work, or anything to say, write it down.

He thought public speaking relied too much on rhetoric and emotion, whereas
with writing it was easier for a sober consideration of the truth to be the
prevailing factor.

------
lukifer
I now consume as much information via spoken word as via print, primarily
because I can do so during other tasks (laundry, driving), and so I find this
topic phenomenally interesting. Speaking is a radically different beast, where
ideas must be wrapped in rhythm, cadence, tone, volume, to the point of
musicality.

I also adore standup, which pays a great deal of attention to repeating the
same rehearsed ideas in an extemporaneous way. Some comedians do so through
writing and obsessive practice (Carlin, Louis CK), others think well purely on
their feet with no preparation, often based on a background in improv (Proops,
Izzard).

To get a little meta, it's worth cross-referencing these ideas with the
Atheism 2.0 TED talk, which among other things discusses the power of the
sermon to unite a group behind a set of ideas and inspire them to action. For
better or worse, ideas break through your defenses and take root more
effectively if (a) you're forced to absorb them in real-time, (b) you know
other people are taking the speaker seriously, and (c) the speaker is
eliciting the same emotional reactions in others that they are eliciting in
you.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html>

------
abiekatz
pg, I think you are a good speaker. Not in the classic motivational speaker
sense but you do speak with conviction and have a unique voice...both
literally and in what you say. You are one of the few authors that I literally
have your voice in my head when I am slowly reading one of your essays. At
least among your target audience, what you have to say is much more important
than how you say it. So keep rewriting your talks minutes before you give
them, even if it leads you to say um during your speeches. As long as you
continue to say what you truly believe, that'll shine through and you will
continue to be a good speaker in my book.

------
mikeleeorg
This made me think of a presentation I recently gave. The first version of my
talk was packed full of information that was relevant to my audience. Some
advisors encouraged me to reduce the content and increase the emotional
appeal. In the end, my presentation contained 25% content and 75% rhetoric
designed to make an emotional connection.

And they were totally right. The audience loved it.

(Arguably, the information I originally packed into it would have been
overwhelming to this audience.)

In contrast, I heard a talk from pg. It was 100% content. And I loved it.

I think it ultimately depends on the audience. Most people probably
unconsciously prefer an emotional connection to a talk, though there are
exceptions. Some of the most lauded talks on TED make a strong emotional
connection while still imparting some important information, though it's
arguably more emotion than content.

And come to think of it, had I gotten pg's talk in written form, I would have
gotten just as much out of it.

------
cdcarter
It's worth noting that a very good speaker often puts the exact amount of hard
content needed. Many times you can see a bad speaker who is bad, not for their
ums and speaking quality, but because they attempt to put too much detail or
too many points into their speech. This is better for text, where people can
examine at their own rate.

------
padobson
"[A] person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence
as it takes to hear it."

This is where discipline enters. When a speaker says something that fires a
massive neuron in your brain, ignore the next five-ten sentences the speaker
is saying and start writing.

When you're in school, you take notes on lectures to pass a test, so you have
to listen to every sentence. School trains your brain to do this, and you need
to untrain it.

When you're at a conference, you're listening to the speaker so you can do
something (hopefully) excellent with the information they're giving you.

When the speaker provides you with a spark of inspiration, that's when you
need to disengage from the talk and let your own brain take it from there.
You'll only miss a handful of sentences, and you'll pack a thought-food lunch
for later. You'll get more out of the talk then if you try to consume and
register every sentence - many of which won't be nearly as useful.

~~~
cperciva
FWIW, as a speaker I use point-form (aka. "powerpoint", although I do them in
LaTex) slides for exactly this reason -- if someone gets distracted and misses
a few sentences of what I'm saying, it helps them "resynchronize" with me.

------
axiom
Here's the thing about giving talks: people will remember only one or two
things you actually said. As a result the approach one should have to putting
together a good talk is totally different than the approach you should have in
writing a good essay.

In a good talk you want to have one central point, repeat it half a dozen
times, and pad it with a whole bunch of very memorable concrete examples.
That's the only way you're going to make anything stick - otherwise people
won't take away anything.

So the goal isn't to pack as much info and wisdom into a talk as possible -
it's to pick that one central point and try and get people to remember it.

This is of course totally different than an essay where people reading it tend
to be less distracted and have time to read it over if necessary. So you can
be more liberal with how much information you're trying to convey and _how
complex_ the idea can be.

------
abecedarius
This difference bothers me in the new online courses too: most of them use
video lectures. Some of the problems don't carry over (the ones about the
audience as a mass), but some do (sentences going by like a stream neither the
speaker nor the listener can as easily go back and forth over). I feel we're
losing something from when a book was the way to reach an audience, and we
could add the interactivity and a lot of the other new advantages without
losing the benefits of text.

Funny how that line about "The moving finger, having writ" has it backwards
now with text easier to revise than speech. (This remark's an addition to my
original comment.)

------
Blocks8
This seems to miss the distinction between a good speaker and a good speech.
Just as there are good writers and good posts. Speakers and writers require
practice, discipline to improve their craft. Speeches and blog posts should
have purpose, entertain and inform.

The best way to measure a successful speech is to see what the audience walks
away with. Usually, the audience walks away with a few lessons, not verbatim
recall of the words spoken or written. Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling's
commencement speeches are two of my favorites. Stories provide entertainment
but the lessons they learned are what the audience walks away with: life is
short, chase your dreams.

------
WordofMok
I agree with the general argument that ideas are best capture in writing but I
think there are some important points that are left out in this piece:

1) When you are listening to a talk/speech, you are hearing information at the
speed which the speaker chooses. Less time is given to process individual
concepts unless you're able to rewind. When you are reading, time is less of a
factor. Now think about what this means for writing vs. speaking.

2)The role of the spoken word in teaching should be highlighted. Some people
learn better when they hear something. One great example are the talks on the
site The Khan Academy. Information is being conveyed in spoken and visual
terms to thousands every day and writing is more of an afterthought.

3) I was once given the privilege of delivering the graduation speech to my
university class. Before I prepared my speech, I asked the college president
what advice he had on speaking to such a large audience of peers and parents.
His response was this: "Just have a conversation with your class." I took this
to heart and thought what message would resonate with my classmates who had
worked hard during their academic careers. Now many were going to go out into
the workforce and this undoubtedly would bring anxiety, confusion and
excitement. Tapping into this emotion, I constructed the speech's core idea to
be a simple one: Build yourself a career worth retiring from. It's no
coincidence that I was able to create a speech only after I wrote out my
thoughts and got feedback from the people that I trust. Writing the speech
took 5 days, practicing and perfecting the speech took 2 weeks.

The point I want to make is that writing and speaking are best used in tandem.
You'll never know what you want to say until you can write what you think. At
the same time, after you have written it down, telling others your idea in the
form of speaking is the best way to tweak your idea and get feedback. Perhaps
in the entrepreneurial world, that's why we want to see people pitch their
ideas in public. Think about all the serendipitous/transformative moments that
have occurred when people pitch their ideas through speaking. Surely, this is
a skill which members of the YC Community can do better to embrace as well as
strive to improve.

------
davidkobilnyk
I find PG to be one of the most interesting and engaging speakers I've ever
heard. He's personable, funny, expressive, and unique. I felt like many of his
'ums' were for comedic effect and I appreciated them in that way.

------
j45
I have found speaking to be much more about introducing the dots to the
audience and letting them connect the dots themselves. To do this the dots
have to presented in a very simple form. Sometimes over simplified.

Good writing, goes a step further. Introducing clear ideas in short form, and
then expanding on each is much more indicative of writing that helps explain
ideas. Especially in Tech/Creative/Startup/Media/Design circles, you have a
bit more liberty to do some of the dot connecting for your readers.

------
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.

------
PaulMest
I enjoy getting up in front of a crowd of people and helping them learn new
concepts in an entertaining fashion. I have taught classes, delivered
presentations, recorded video podcasts with millions of views, traveled as a
motivational speaker, and performed standup comedy all over the U.S.

What I like about speaking that you don't get from writing:

1) Seeing people's reaction in near real-time. This is a good feedback loop
when you're working on how to explain a new product or feature before
producing an on-demand recording that could be viewed by 1000x the people in
the audience. It's like a focus-group or a series of live A/B tests.

2) A chance to convert the less-dedicated into customers/fans/subscribers. It
seems a lot of people are too lazy to read long articles let alone books these
days. A good video can go a long way. I watched a lecture by Eric Ries and
immediately acquired The Lean Startup for my Kindle.

I think speaking is a great way to get people excited about a topic and teach
them a handful of concepts. If my talk is successful, I will have inspired
many to drill in on the topic later or become a fan of my product, my podcast,
or my standup comedy. I always try to accompany my talks with easy-to-remember
URLs or QR codes so that it minimizes the friction between their interest for
more information and taking the next step.

------
jeffdavis
I think a lot of the value of a talk is that it is constrained. It takes much
less time to read than to hear the same words, so talks must be delivered with
fewer words.

Constraints are paradoxical in a way. Most (all?) forms of art are subject to
constraints, and in some ways are defined by them. That could be a musical
structure, or a medium. After all, wouldn't origami be easier with scissors
and glue? For that matter, maybe you could just use a 3D printer, and it would
look more realistic. But that takes away the art.

So what does the constraint of a talk -- fewer words -- have to offer? I think
it changes the message to focus more on convincing the audience to care about
the topic, and less about the details. In writing, you have to account for
many of the objections someone might raise without being too boring. When
giving a talk, you can just convince the audience to care, and then they will
request clarifications along the way.

Some of those clarifications are during the talk and can be settled
immediately. Some are during the "hall track" of a conference, or in follow-up
blog posts. After a presidential speech, a lot of the clarifications are
handled by the press secretary.

So, a talk is a different structure of information flow, and I don't think
it's inferior in that regard to writing.

------
Lucadg
I am a mediocre speaker and a fairly good writer (in Italian) and I always
wondered wether these two skills are somewhat mutually exclusive. The same
happens to me with learning languages (I'm good, I speak 7 fluently) and
orientation (I get lost after two turns even in a city I know). I agree with
pg in preferring to be able to write well rather than speak well, as the
written word is more powerful in the long term and is a better carrier of
powerful ideas.

------
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.

------
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.

------
larrys
"Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those
around them ...

Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that
conference was that everyone else did."

Along the same lines there were (and still are) claques, rieurs etc. whose
sole purpose is to create the social proof necessary for a good performance.

Similar to TV laugh tracks or even the use of music in film and tv.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque>

------
sidman
I think your right PG but there are some caveats. For one i think to be able
to pass it off that ideas are better then speaking (which i do agree with) you
need to have some clout behind you and prove your worth and you have surely
done that with respect to startups and the tech world. Honestly if anyone else
did the talk you did (new ideas) and delivered it the way you did (lots of
um's) i'm sure the crowed would have passed it of as a lunatic with crazy
ideas who cant even speak. I sometimes empathize and if it was me that was
there I would classify myself as a raving lunatic who cant speak.

I think this is again part of the subset of ideas that looking good and
looking smart is actually better then being smart cause perception is
everything. I personally have always look at whats inside and what the actual
words mean, even when im listening to a song i listen to the words and if they
effect me rather then the sexiness of the singer (like i know most of my
friends do)

I remember watching a movie called puncture with chris odonnel(sp?) where he
was a lawyer promoting safe needles that could save front line health workers
from getting accidentally stuck and the inventor of the needle didn't know how
to present infront of the investors. As a result he got nothing even though he
had a great product with great potential. (the movie was based on a true
story)

So i do agree with you however i think for most of us without much clout still
trying to prove ourselves in the world learning to speak well is just as
important as learning to write and have ideas (i hate speaking publicly but im
trying). If we cant present ourselves to investors or to customers well (or
intelligently) we wont even get into the door :)

------
amasad
There is two links to steve jobs' talks [1][2] that are not rendered because
of some kind of typo. the opening tag of which i believe is intended to be an
anchor tag is "nota" instead of "a".

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc> [2]
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ>

~~~
Jakob
This also breaks the Safari Reader (similar to Readability).

------
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.)

------
bitsweet
_no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational
speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for_

By this standard, I'd say PG is an excellent speaker regardless of any
superfluous "ums". I recall back in 2006 at the first Railsconf, I was at
lunch with Martin Fowler (arguably one of the best speakers in our industry
who happened to be keynoting at that Railsconf) and some other co-workers. The
food was was taking to long to come out so Martin Fowler left because he
didn't want to miss PG speak. I had no idea who PG was but figured I shouldn't
miss his talk if Fowler thought it was worth skipping lunch for.

I remember PG literally up there, head down, reading the easy
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html>) for his keynote. It didn't matter
that the audience didn't laugh or that he was visibly uncomfortable. What
mattered was how our thinking was influenced afterward. It certainly
"motivated" me enough to send my life on a completely new trajectory.

------
tlammens
I like the format of a talk to spur my interest in a certain topic. (like the
TED talks)

It would be nice when every talk would be accompanied by a text that deepens
the subject, so I can read more about it.

Although a talk is nice, I am always left with a feeling that it barely
scratched the surface of the topic.

As a side note: pg, you are a very good writer, you should write more books,
please? :)

------
transmitivity
Related: a repo called killer-talks [1] appeared a few days ago on GitHub.
I've not watched them all but the few I have seen (especially the Rich Hickey
talks) are prime examples of exceptional speakers communicating important,
novel ideas.

[1] <https://github.com/pharkmillups/killer-talks>

------
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).

------
Dbase
I think this post is simply a justification for being better at writing than
speaking. Speaking is a clearer form of conveying ideas than writing. Speaking
is also the most ancient & more evolved form of conveying ideas. Another way
to look at it is via personality traits. Good speakers are usually extroverts,
hacker types are mostly introverts which is why they find it easy to
communicate with themselves than others, let alone an audience. Which is why
they are better at writing words or code but not that good at public speaking.
I think that there is no relation between being smart & being a better
speaker, so it's wrong to call better speakers dumb. Its only a question of
your personality type and that determines whether you will be a good speaker
or bad one. Nothing to do with being smart.

------
roschdal
I don't care that pg says "umm" a lot. The _content_ of the essays and
speeches is what I find interesting.

------
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.

------
jeffdavis
"As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is
increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter."

I don't think intelligence has as much to do with it as whether or not you've
convinced the audience to care about the topic. If the audience doesn't care,
they will be looking for other ways to pass the time, such as laughing at
jokes.

Now, it may have to do with intelligence or it may not. But I believe my
perspective is more useful when writing or speaking because it leads to a more
obvious solution. Rather than going around looking for smart audiences, you
can instead look for audiences that have a reason to care about the topic, and
then find the most concise way possible to tell them that reason at the
beginning of the essay/talk.

It's also a lot less condescending, quite frankly.

------
BrandonM
Richard Feynman, for me, is the clearest counterexample to this essay. In his
prime, he was one of the top physicists in the field, having some of the best
ideas, and he was still a captivating speaker who could convey complex ideas
in an interesting and informative way.

------
dwd
It's all about the context.

pg once explained essays are his exploration of an idea and I would hazard to
guess in many cases the conclusions are still born out of the act of writing.
<http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html>

tl;dr Essaying is not about the writer's clarity of thought but the process of
bringing their thought into clarity.

As for professional public speaking look at it in the context of their
motivation and why they are up there: is it to promote an idea, sell more of
their books or simply get invited to speak again? If their goals are being met
then maybe they are an effective (good) speaker. Did it provide real value to
every member of the audience? Only as far as it meets the speaker's goal.

------
capex
It happens with poets too. Some poets used to read their poetry to an
audience, and if it wasn't shallow enough to be understood by the average
person, they were booed. Great ideas need time to be understood and absorbed,
and a listener simply doesn't have the time.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Hi Paul

I do not agree with you, you can be a good speaker and a good writer, but
maybe you need to see it first to believe it is possible.

The main problem is that you don't believe it is possible. Ancient Greeks were
masters of this. Learn a good book about memorization, odds are that you are
are highly kinesthetic so I would recommend you the Greek method of
associating ideas or concepts to places, like the roof, or the person in the
first row, or the chair. Greeks were talking while walking.

You only memorize the ideas in the order that you wrote them and then you can
be free and "fill the gaps".

It is very important that you do not put pressure on yourself to do that but
enjoy it as an experiment. It is really fun and the outcome will be impressive
for your audience.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
bbgm
Good speaking, like good writing, is about narrative. They are delivered in
different ways and each approach is powerful in its own right. A good speaker
is often able to get ideas through to a broader audience more effectively than
the written word, and definitely you can connect to your audience in ways you
can't in writing.

It seems somewhat ridiculous to say one is better that the other. Both are
important, both can be effective. Some are good at one or the other. A smaller
number are good at both. Personally, while I love reading essays (including
PG's), listening to a great speaker can be inspiring and present many ideas
and points to ponder.

------
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...

------
vibrunazo
I agree with most of it. But it _seems_ he is implying that learning to become
a better speaker is linearly proportional, even inversely proportional to
improving your ideas or your writing. I agree you probably make a better use
of your time improving your ideas rather than your speech. But don't you think
there are diminishing returns to how efficient use of time it's to improve
ideas vs speech? Isn't there a point, after which, your idea is already good
enough. That it's more efficient to spend time improving your speech instead
of your ideas?

I believe so. And sometimes I think, maybe, pg crossed that line.

------
israelpasos
I would agree that speaking relates to action whereas writing relates to
contemplation and creation.

I don't believe it's one or the other but rather both being part of the cycle
that enables us to transform our reality.

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

~~~
sberkun12
ABS: your wish is my command:

On Speaking vs. Writing: <http://t.co/SYOqGZfm>

~~~
ABS
awesome, thanks!

------
mbh
I am sorry but OP is missing the point here. A good speaker knows his audience
and hence prepares his talk accordingly. If it is techies, he should put for
technical content which stimulates their brain. If it is children of the 3rd
grade, he should know to keep it light and crack jokes or tell stories. A good
speaker will change his speech depending on how dumb or intelligent the
audience is. Thats his trait. Now if he has a large and varied audience, this
task gets a lot harder, but then again there is a trend in the audience.

------
drostie
I like how there was an extremely long silence, and then suddenly there was
one little talk, which had to be posted online, and then that talk mentioned
another idea which had to be posted online, and during that talk you said "um"
too much, which required another post online. I like it because it almost
makes me think that you're next going to blog about how you are blogging too
much and really need to stop blogging. :P

To be fair, I think we also got 3 updates in January? So I imagine it's more a
function of available time than momentum.

------
david927
I think it's the same distinction as telling someone something (as in notes)
and showing someone something (as in art). When you show someone something,
making them experience it empathetically, it can change who they are. They can
accept the information viscerally. Sometimes, strangely, just knowing new
information isn't enough -- we have to feel it.

A good talk can make someone feel emotional, as if they arrived at the
information on their own, and that they "owned" the new knowledge. And that's
a very powerful thing.

------
shazow
pg is certainly not the best speaker I've seen but is one of my favourites to
listen to. Every word has so much value behind it, and the honesty of his
thoughts comes across much better in-person than in-essay.

I notice pg uses footnotes very liberally throughout all of his essays. How do
you decide when something should be a footnote, as opposed to another sentence
or parenthesized thought or simply redacted?

I'm used to footnotes being links and references, not clarifications or
justifications as I often find here.

------
fabricode
Removing the "ums" (a distraction) is a far cry from going to the dark side of
public speaking ("vacuousness").

One insight I had into public speaking was that good speakers pause. There is
white space in their delivery. These are typically the locations where a less
experienced speaker puts his verbal tics.

Just as we prefer well-spaced, paragraph style coding over wall-of-text
maintenance nightmares, we should work towards removing our fear of "dead air"
and let our presentations breathe a bit.

------
VMG
I don't agree that good speakers make the audience dumber. There are and have
been a lot of good speakers that can transmit ideas in an entertaining way
without compromising on content. Christopher Hitchens and Neil deGrasse Tyson
come to mind.

It certainly is hard work to get there, but it may be worth it. For example, I
didn't watch the pycon video because I've seen the comments and can't tolerate
bad sound quality or speech that is difficult to follow. Sorry.

------
Tycho
One added benefit of seeing a speaker rather than just reading an essay is
that you can better judge the conviction in their statements. Lots of people
trim their essays/articles to a state of dry assertiveness, because it's the
expected style. But in person they're more likely to add things like 'and i
spent a long time trying to work this out, and to be honest I'm not sure I've
got it right, but my working conclusion is that...'

------
jakeonthemove
I always wonder how people believe politicians - they are indeed good
speakers, but when you listen closely, it's nothing but filler most of the
time...

------
drumdance
The counter-example is Kathy Sierra. I don't know if she still gives talks,
but her presentations at SXSW several years ago totally change the way I think
about app development. She also had an excellent blog, but her presentations
were even better because she used the slides to both show examples and also
heighten emotional momentum (which in itself the theme of her work - making
your apps loveable).

------
peter_l_downs
"What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of
being a good writer than being a good speaker."

This is the money quote.

EDIT: fixed formatting.

------
benthumb
A great speech @ Google on a subject directly apropos of pg's start-up spiel:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo>

Another awesome speech from Google's tech talk series (it takes a little bit
of tyrant to pull this off, tho):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8>

------
technoir
It's funny because there is a good philosophical debate out there on whether
the written or spoken word is better.

Socrates felt that the spoken word was better, since it was less removed from
the truth.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Discussion_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_\(dialogue\)#Discussion_of_rhetoric_and_writing_.28257c-279c.29)

------
GeorgeTirebiter
"... who was much better than me." "...not merely a better speaker than me,
..."

I apologize in advance for being so pedantic, but the nuns at St. Augustine
School in Pittsburgh used yardsticks on my body to beat this into my brain:
"... who was much better than I (was)" and "... not merely a better speaker
than I (am), ...". Damn subjective vs objective case. Thank you.

------
6ren
The arguments here signify the content of the essay - if it contained only
joke and anecdote, it would be impossible to dispute.

To add my own dispute, content-free writing is possible. Consider some self-
help books; and Ed Catmull described most business books as "content-free" (in
his Stanford Business School talk).

Most public speaking is entertainment - like TV news.

------
antirez
It's hardly so black and white, writing or speaking. For instance tweets are
in many ways more similar to talking than writing, it's not something you
think a lot about, but more like a long conversation where it is important to
keep people interested while actually providing some information.

------
thomasjoulin
I thought pg talk was amazing and inspiring. Really good speaker in my
opinion, this didn't seem like he was reading. I think the only problem are
the obvious and loud "huuuuuh", but that's something he can train himself not
to say. I wouldn't qualify him as a bad speaker. Quite the contrary

------
tmsh
I totally agree with this essay, esp. in regard to ideas that are 'new' and
are still being dynamically formulated.

There is an opportunity cost associated with different 'top ideas' or perhaps
in this case 'top attitudes' in one's mind. If one's interest is in delivering
a great speech, that does impugn upon great thinking.

However, the key is just don't give talks on ideas that are too fresh (unless
you plan on using the feedback and dialogic nature of talks to your advantage
-- but that's less 'talks' and more 'conversations' or Socratic dialogues,
etc.). If the goal is to deliver a great speech, you have to have an idea that
is fixed so that you can spend your energy applying it to the audience's
situation.

Yes, in rare situations one can do both (dynamically eval and dynamically
apply), but they are somewhat overlapping, competing tasks.

ETA. One more quick thought -- making this a long post:

I think a lot of public speaking is giving the audience opportunities to
'latch on' to what one is saying. And it's easiest to do this by repeating
yourself in various different ways that may interest the listener (different
listeners latch on based on different shared life experiences, etc.).

Essay writing is similar. But in that form, you give the reader an opportunity
to pause at any time and re-read or just think about the material. This
advantage in turn means that less repetition (however artfully enhanced in
speech) is required.

People are also better at skimming to what they think is important in essays.
So they will skim over structural 'ums' (style that they don't find helpfully
repetitive). Whereas, in speech an audience will tend to latch onto whatever
is repeated.

Hence, if you choose behavior that focuses on formulation of thoughts
repetitively in waves, extemporaneously speaking is more natural. If you
choose behavior that insists on sifting towards the truth (and I've seen that
recording of PG writing an essay), then written words can be more natural.
Everyone can do both with practice, but they are different I think.

It's incorrect to say one is more 'truthful' than the other. In aggregate,
knowledge among #'s of people in the universe can be about the same with both
(e.g., great speaking brings a lot of people a little bit forwards; great
essay writing and thinking can bring a more limited set a little more forward
-- but the total area may be the same at the end of the day... -- note, these
are generalized examples based on a perceived average type of speech and
average type of essay).

------
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.

------
tferris
Paul, that's your problem (and you know it yourself):

"Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a corner somewhere
with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my head."

The more your script the worse you are.

=> First, do not try to be like all the great speakers you know, forget them,
don't try to be better than you are or somebody else. Just be yourself and
don't try to be perfect.

=> Forget that you presenting to a crowd, rather think of speaking to just one
person—a good friend (imagine this, would you script a conversation to a
friend?? No!)

=> Never, really never learn a script, that's the worst thing a presenter can
do (ok, you need for very formal und official occasions like political
speeches a script but even then some parts shouldn't be scripted word by
word). Just rehearse the first five sentences of your presentation (to get in)
+ the topics you want to talk about. Before the presentation practice, but
don't take notes just use the few topics to have some rough storyline. That's
enough, the rest will come to your mind by itself. Sometimes you have to think
and you make short pauses but this is normal and makes the speech authentic.
Again THAT'S your problem: you want to be perfect, to deliver a perfect speech
with no mistakes and to go into a presentation with this expectations just
doesn't work.

=> Ideas and the presentation's contents are the most important part of a
presentation (not accurately chosen words). Great ideas are not so important
for the audience as they are for your enthusiasm and charisma while being on
stage. If you haven't got any outstanding idea (good is not enough), don't
present. If you have just one very good idea then do not present 10 other crap
ideas. Look, the content has to be so great that when it came the first time
to your mind you had the urge to call a friend and to tell it to him. If you
are really enthusiastic about your content you don't need a damn script. Or
with other words: your goal is not to deliver a perfect speech for the sake of
a perfect speech, your goal is to transport a brilliant idea. I know that
there many good speeches where the content is not brilliant but that doesn't
matter, important is that YOU/the speaker think the ideas are brilliant.

=> Ultimately, you need tons of self-confidence, that means that you are
really proud of yourself or better your really love yourself and what you are
going to say (basically that's the most important thing; the more self-
confidence you have, the smaller is your need to deliver a perfect
presentation)

=> A final hack: sit while presenting if the circumstances allow (much easier
and good for beginners)

I saw you on some panels, you were very good, charismatic and strong (because
your talks weren't scripted). Don't say you are a bad speaker, you are pretty
good, you just had a bad day or you havent found the key yet. And look: maybe
your presentation wasn't the best but did we stopped liking you? So, no need
to be perfect.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Speaking is way superior to writing, not the other way around like Paul
states. Speaking includes writing.

It conveys emotional information, it adds intonation, gravity, spotlight over
the important information.

About not having time to think about what you hear, that is what ipods and
iphones are for. The ipod sound player has an icon for "repeat last 30
seconds" for that as much as you want.

I can not believe how much Paul insults those that are better than him on this
particular area. I like how Paul writes but it seems that he feels the need to
downplay those who he could learn most from.

Psychology teaches us that in order for us to learn from someone else we need
fist to admire him. Paul is despising those that are better than him in order
to not improve in this area.

------
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.".

------
tzm
Reminds me of Taylor Mali's poem: "Totally like whatever, you know?"
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKyIw9fs8T4>

------
davmar
oh paul, what a mental block have created for yourself! the first sentence of
your essay is "i'm not very good at __". well of course you're not going to be
a good speaker if you tell yourself that.

you speak to high-IQ crowds and you discuss complex ideas. you don't have to
be a JFK public speaker, but having a "beginner's attitude" and spending a few
hours with a public speaking coach could probably work wonders for you _and_
your audiences.

------
revorad
PG, since you publish your "talks" as essays anyway, why don't you use your
talks to tell interesting stories (from YC or other times of your life)? As
you already pointed out, it's better for the audience too to read your essays
and think carefully about the ideas, rather than react in a linear fashion
with the rest of the crowd.

Stories, on the other hand, like "How YC started" would be much more engaging
to hear from you than read. The content of the stories should be interesting
enough ("Never a dull moment?"), so that you don't have to make any extra
effort to seem interesting.

------
henrikgs
pg strike me as a good speaker. Yes the "uhm" thing was a bit too much on the
pycon video, but I think that is easy to get rid of with a little bit of
training

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

A lot of people state this as a fault in their presentation skills, but is it
really? It can be quite powerful and captivating with pauses in an ever
streaming chain of talking, and I really don't think the audience mind.

------
Jimmy
>If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words
and you'll be perceived as having a good style.

Clearly PG has never read Ulysses.

------
frigite_
I don't think that pg is a bad speaker. However, if you think you are, why not
consider working on it? Toastmasters or similar might help.

------
aestetix
pg, thanks for bringing this up! It's actually a really dense topic, and there
are a bunch of ways to look at it. Having done an increasing amount of public
speaking over the last few years, I can say from experience that there are a
lot of dynamics at play.

I think you are absolutely correct, prewritten speeches, even if memorized,
rarely translate well into a live speech. They usually come off as either
forced, too structured, and feel like a movie that's been hastily adapted from
a book.

There's a reason for the saying "it's 10 percent what you say and 90 percent
how you say it." Written versus spoken words convey different things. When
you're giving a talk, or listening to one, there's a sort of energy exchange
that happens. A really good charismatic speaker can make every person in the
room feel like they are being directly spoken to, regardless of what the topic
is (Bill Clinton is famous for this). Someone who has just been in the
presence of a good speaker might not remember every word in the talk, but they
have a sense of personal empowerment and motivation to go do or be something.

The written word, on the other hand, _can_ trigger those emotions, though it
engages on a different level. It's an individual, rather than a group
relationship. If you're in a crowd watching a good speaker, you're sharing
that experience with everyone in the crowd. If you're reading a book or essay,
you're sharing that moment specifically with the author, and perhaps with the
topics or characters in the essay.

A lot of good speakers and writers alike will formulate a narrative that
people can relate to. One of my favorite examples of this in writing is
Charles Petzold's book "Code", where he demonstrates how to create a basic
computer, from the ground up. The book in itself is a sort of story, where the
main caricature is the advances in logic and thought over the years. He
manages to take a topic that is often dry and boring (truth tables? binary
arithmetic?) and creates a form people can relate to.

There's also a lot to be said for confidence. If a speaker is confidence,
people in the room will entrust them with a sense of authority. If a writer is
confident, I'm more likely to continue reading on. To describe confidence in a
writer... if you consider a speaker's ability to sidestep "um" and "ya know",
and their control either to not ramble offtopic or to quickly bring their
ramble full circle back to the topic at hand, then also look at a writer's
ability, rather than stumbling around with words, to grasp them and use them
with a magician's mastery. That is, they've gotten past memorizing the
alphabetic building blocks, and began to create more elaborate form and
structures.

Ok, now _I_ want to write an essay on this... :)

------
andrewtbham
There are ways to become a better speaker if you're interested... like
toastmasters.

------
iandanforth
There is very little useful content in this essay, and the arrogance with
which is presented has clearly rubbed some the wrong way. Let's address the
same topic with reminders of what most of us know but might like to have a
handy cheat sheet for.

Speaking:

Lets the audience see your face and body.

Lets the audience connect with your emotional state.

Lets you use humor based on timing, intonation, homonyms, slapstick, etc.

Lets you gesture for emphasis and explanation.

Lets you use rhythm and volume.

Lets you interact with a crowd rather than an individual.

Lets you control the speed and continuity of information transfer.

Gives the opportunity to match words with other dynamic visuals.

And this is with only one person talking on a stage. The superset of oral
communication, of which the speech is a tiny subset, is huge.

Writing:

Can contain far more information in a longer form.

Can contain far denser information assuming that a reader can re-read and grok
at their own pace.

Is much easier to compress, store, transfer and search.

Allows for footnotes, citations, links etc which encompass a freedom of
consumptive flow. (Do I read the footnote now or come back to it?)

Also a bit less clearly, writing:

Is considered more serious. 'put it in writing' vs. 'just hot air.'

Often takes considerably more time to produce, lending it implied value.

May be assumed to be the end result of a great deal of careful thought.

\----

It takes a lot of time to add the skills of persuasion and performance to the
skills of thinking clearly, generating good ideas, and writing them down. It
also means you get to convey fewer ideas in the same amount of time.

Perhaps PG isn't willing to make this tradeoff, but there is a lesser and
necessary tradeoff to be made.

A speech does not have to be an entertaining performance, it can be terse,
information packed, and extremely useful. The annoying thing though is that
for any _public_ speech to work it has a set of things it needs to avoid.
Pauses, twitches, perspiration, clothing faux pas. Stupid things that distract
an _audience_.

While PG is correct that you can have a beautiful content free performance,
that really isn't his concern. What does he care how other people speak?
Instead he should focus on perfecting the basics of public speaking technique
so his audience forgets about the medium and can concentrate on his ideas.

------
nhangen
Yes, he said 'um' a lot. No, it didn't bother me.

We're all only human.

------
ErrantX
Hmmmm.

I think there is an important set of ideas here, I don't necessarily think pg
expresses them well (which might be ironic, given the topic...).

I love to speak. I regularly give talks to my old school, and another school I
went to briefly. Last year I was asked to speak at the university department I
went to, which was fantastic. I also love to write; fiction and non-fiction.
About myself, about ideas, about made up stuff. I started both of these
things, really, in about 2006. At that point I was awful at both -
particularly writing. If I could overcome the nerves I was good at speaking,
but my writing was disjointed and confusing.

The first lesson I learned is; skill comes with practice.

8 years later, I'm still not the best of writers. But I'm not the worst
either. That took me (estimating Wikipedia contribution, forums/message
boards, lengthy emails, blogs, etc.) a significant part of 2 million words.

God it was fun!

Over that time I learned a second thing; which is that speaking _is_ hugely
trivial. And writing requires intense depth.

I used to look at motivational speakers and think "what a lot of bullshit".
Which it definitely is. But it is inspiring bullshit. Speech is about arousing
emotion and interest; a good speaker tries to excite a listener into thinking
about a topic. And leaves them wanting to find out more about it - typically
by reading.

Take "Wear Sunscreen"[1]. Any aspiring speaker _and writer_ should read and
understand how utterly brilliant that piece of address is. I only wish it was
a real address - because that is a writer who damn well understands speaking!

A good writer has a whole lot more tools to her disposal than a good speaker.
For a start she has much more of your attention - it's easy to zone out from a
speaker, especially if it's a guy giving your commencement address or a class
lecture (where you expect some level of droning boredom). Usually reading is a
choice - you are digging into something, and you are willing to process more
detail. For a speaker the attention span is much shorter - the listener can't
pause and run back over the last sentence. They have to consume in real time.

So for me, well, I want to be a brilliant speaker and a brilliant writer. I
want to give you a speech that inspires you, and I want to write about things
that mean something to you.

pg talks about the good speaker and mentions laughter as a tool. He pitches
that as representing a successful talk, but having no depth. I disagree - I'd
say that is a bad talk. Laughter is certainly a useful tool in moderation. But
in my experience newbie speakers, who have progressed beyond the "um" (sorry
pg!) stage into "I want to learn this art", see a laughing audience and think
the nut is cracked.

Far from it! You've got them listening for an instant - but your joke isn't
likely to be inspiring. These speakers are the true hacks - they try to hang
useful things off of many jokes, and largely fail. I'm not a brilliant
speaker, yet, but I think I am past this stage. And what you learn is that a
joke can grab their attention - and then you have a short time to make use of
that interest. Another joke doesn't give them anything... If he walked away
from that talk without any useful information - even a springboard for more
research - then the speaker failed.

If he transcribed those speeches and his had more content perhaps there is
something to consider; could he use the talents of that "good" speaker to hook
the interest of the audience and impart a hunger to read his much more
impressive writings?

The art of speaking is to use these hooks. A joke is the simplest - but there
are many more. Repetition, as exampled by Martin Luther-King, or irony. The
list is really endless.

This is why "Wear Sunscream" is brilliant. The whole thing is a joke, sure;
but it has loads of useful advice as well. The speech shifts around, using all
manner of hooks to keep the audience interested and amused, whilst imparting
advice. And best of all it leaves you wanting to know more.

Which is when the writing comes in.

OK. pg says a lot of the same things as I have; but where he comes off as
being critical of hooky speech, I think it has a good place :) We should all
be better writers and speakers.

Perhaps this is bullshit too, I don't know, it's probably not good writing...

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen>

------
niborsilliw
I am currently trying to get my speaking chops together in anticipation of
launching our game changing, earth moving start up by following the course
that Conor Neil has put together. <http://www.conorneill.com/> Conor has also
offered our budding Barcelona Internet Startup Community a series of workshops
that have served a couple of purposes 1. to make us better speakers and 2. to
unite us as a community. He's terrific. So far so good.

In my life as director of commercials I have often been required to speak to
groups of people. Whether it's a conference call or the "pre pro" meeting
since I be "the man" I have to deliver the goods and coming from the formerly
reticent Portland, Oregon I was not exactly hard wired to be a good speaker. I
also occasionally have to speak at conferences which is an entirely different
experience.

One of my tricks for a small group is to try to get everybody to sit as
closely together as possible and I often try sit between "the client" and
whoever is my big buddy at the agency. Usually it's the producer or the
creative director or the writer. I'm trying to keep this as warm, cozy and
informal as possible. We're all one big happy family. Usually it works.
Production wise we always have our act together. Mood books. Animatics.
Examples from other better, films. Really good casting and the performances to
back them up. And by nature I use a lot of goofy asides (thankfully I'm a
comedy director) and I keep it moving at a good clip. My thinking is that if I
talk fast nobody will actually notice that I have completely taken over the
concept and returned it to the great idea the 22 year intern had in the shower
18 months ago before it was reduce to meaningless drivel by the focus
group/committee/in law review paradigm. We'll shoot both ways is swell way to
get around a conflict. Mostly it works... they usually rub out any creativity
in the editing process but at least we try. So small is beautiful. I'm your
buddy. "See you in Buenos Aires!" Works. And to tell you the truth... it's not
an act. It's me. I'm a natural cub scout activities director. Mostly I like
people. And oddly over the years I have actually become a real chatter box...
which is quite a feat for a Northwestern guy where old schoolers are prone
maybe uttering a guttural groan every six months or so.

The bigger shows are different. I write them. I use marital... sorry visual
aids and make it as tight as possible. I always like to have a dry side and a
wet side. The dry side is the scripted part which I practice a lot and is
hopefully as tight as a drum... ok with lots of incongruous hopefully funny
asides... and the wet side is where I make some poor schlub from the audience
come up and bite creamed corn or something.

I went to Conor's first meet up and was impressed but... it seemed to me that
he was in many ways pretty much just working the room. He was selling. There
was a predictable rhythm to it. Ice breaker. Intrigue, involve, challenge.
Repeat. Good night. We discussed this over emails and for the next session he
completely changed his focus... which was commendable and interesting and much
more honest and compelling.

So my take away from this current focus on public speaking is that I really
don't like the super pros. The folks that could hold an audience in rapt
attention reading a phone book. It's an act and when you actually see through
the smoke and mirrors... there is usually not much there. It's like the "The
Deer Hunter." I left the theater in a daze... and then about 4 minutes later I
decided I had no idea what the film was about.

I watch the TED talks all the time. Here's a favorite.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)
Sir Ken is funny. Informal. Self effacing and emotionally and intellectually
compelling... absolutely spot on and I will follow him to hell.

The passionate, inspirational, self important, arm waving salesmen...
forgetdaboutit.

------
ahoyhere
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 not hold up to rational
inspection whatsoever.

No citations. No references to other writers, speakers, or thinkers. Just
pure, bald, superficial statement.

I can't recommend more strongly that you read this essay by Maciej Cegłowski,
the founder of Pinboard:

<http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm>

Then this essay on classical style:

<http://t.co/EmDMquOx>

~~~
pg
Can you give any examples of specific sentences I wrote that you believe are
false?

~~~
ahoyhere
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 not merely orthogonal to having good ideas,
but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction."_

How so? You have sentences that sort of follow this, but you don't actually
explain this statement.

 _"The way to get the attention of an audience is to give them your full
attention"_

How do you figure? You've admitted you're a poor public speaker and
particularly at this skill, so how are you an expert on how it _does_ work? If
you've done some research, I'd love to hear it.

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

How do you know? Have you done this successfully? I have lots of friends who
are on the professional speaking circuit (such as it is for tech people --
unpaid, for the hell of it) and I don't know anyone who's an accomplished
speaker (except myself) who does it this way. For their part, they think I'm
crazy for doing it this way. It works for me but I certainly wouldn't say it's
a best practice.

 _"Actors do… Actors don't face that temptation except in the rare cases…"_

Are you an actor? Have you researched acting? Have actor friends? How did you
arrive at this conception of how acting works?

 _"Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like to be swept off
their feet by a vigorous stream of words."_

I don't see any proof or further argument to back this statement up. Meanwhile
the way it's phrased makes it very clear about what _you_ think you are bad at
and probably why _you_ don't believe public speaking has much value.

 _"As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is
increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter."_

Evidence? Argument?

And, fun: by using a loaded word like "bullshitter," you are relying on
emotional reactions instead of appealing to reason or backing up you assertion
with facts.

 _"That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with
talks."_

How do you figure?

 _"Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader."_

So what you're leading us so delicately to believe is that the audience is
perforce dumb and therefore being a good speaker is largely about being a good
bullshitter. Do you have any argument to back THIS up?

 _"Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that."_

This just made me laugh.

 _"Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each
sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long
thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it."_

So you're saying that you have proof that in a conversation, the listener's
entire brain is taken up with listening to each individual sentence, and not
thinking about things that came out of the talker's mouth 30 seconds ago? Or,
we know this cannot possibly be true in regular conversation, but you have
proof it is true in an audience/public speaking relationship?

Also, here you create a false dichotomy only to knock it down: The only good
way to speak is to create an outline then ad lib. If you ad lib, you can only
think about each sentence as it leaves your mouth. Therefore, you cannot be
thinking about what you're saying. Because of course, if you ad lib, you
cannot practice or rehearse, because that would be the same as reading…?

 _"So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word as a
source of ideas."_

As jeffdavis pointed out, this statement is actually totally unsupported. You
didn't actually address _the communicative value of a talk_ at any point in
this essay, you talked about things around (one might say orthogonal) to the
value -- e.g. the audience is a mob, bullshitting, ad libbing, getting the
audience attention, and some statements about how you can only think of a
sentence while you're saying it or hearing it.

I would love to see it if you do have an argument for saying that talks are
inferior to the written word, because as you are probably aware, there is a
lot of evidence that written communication is inferior to verbal communication
-- lower persuasion, higher misunderstandings, more projection on part of the
reader, lower empathy, requiring much MORE written communication for the same
level of understanding as would be reached by speaking.

 _"It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as
motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It's
probably what it was originally for."_

This one is particularly interesting because, of course, the art of rhetoric
dates back to the Greeks and no less than Artistotle himself wrote a scroll on
the many, many uses of speaking, and how to do it, and how to achieve all
kinds of different effects.

It's hard to believe that someone as smart as yourself would make such
statements about the value of public speaking without even mentioning any of
the prior art (e.g. The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle, or any of the later
thinkers - Francis Bacon, etc).

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
dingfeng_quek
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 intelligent people, i.e. not those who were conned
by the sokhal hoax), the essay is not designed to be one.

pg: I can give examples of great scholarly works where the author is confused,
but the domain is highly specific, and probably outside of your interests. For
less technical subjects outside of expert-to-expert communication where some
spend years to develop new ideas, there's generally less preference for
insight over clarity.

ahoyhere: If you're looking for well-researched expositions in this area, I'm
sure you already know where to look. Hm... But I think today's social-
psych/cognitive research is better than what Aristotle says.

~~~
ahoyhere
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.

------
Porter_423
lol actually this rise from being excessive chatting.I don't think improving
writing skill is not very difficult for the native English speaking country.

