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.

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

If you don't, then many other kind of glyphs and grammars arise. At the extreme, diagrams, mathematical expressions, etc, often lack even a correspondence with spoken language. Similarly, spoken languages have many subtle indicators and markers (often temporal or intonation-based) that isn't easily translatable to the written word.

Perhaps it is more the case that a man who thinks writing is the better medium has spent more time developing his skills as an essayist than developing his skills as a speaker. In fact, I see the essay as a justification for that decision.

  > A few years later I heard a talk by someone who
  > was not merely a better speaker than me, but
  > a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I
  > decided I'd pay close attention to what he
  > said, to learn how he did it. After about ten
  > sentences I found myself thinking "I don't
  > want to be a good speaker."

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

A. regardless of how good someone is at public speaking, it is largely independent of their writing skill.

An additional possible inference from the article is:

B. they may/should find it significantly more efficient to impart those or even more ideas in writing than in speech. That is, some aspect of writing itself is simply more efficient than speech for transfer of idea information.

However, I do agree that pg's article does seem to gloss over,

1. the binding effect of emotion to ideas. Emotion is far easier to impart and create via public speaking due to intonation, pauses, story-telling, comedy, body language etc (not even going to add side channels like slides, though they are likely important). Several studies have shown that, for example, comedy is an extremely strong means to reinforce the transfer of new information or complex ideas due to the body's physical and biochemical response.

2. audience interaction does not have to be negative or neutral, but can often reveal how much is new information or what those participants value the most.

Of course, ultimately, to expect pg to cover even a fraction of the full dynamics of public speech and language writing in one blog article maybe is asking a little too much :)

Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas. Is someone who says that saying "clarity of thought or soccer ability, pick one?"

  > "I don't want to be a good speaker."

a) The guy on stage doesn't have any ideas and is a brilliant speaker. b) Flashiness appears to preclude good ideas, or is at odds with it. c) Hence, I don't want to be a good speaker.

If I'm still getting it wrong, please explain what the anecdote means -- especially given that, apparently, your essays contain only exactly what you intend them to contain.

[EDIT: Slight rephrasing.]

However, a more in depth reading is that being a good speaker is in opposition to the process of improving one's ideas. His example of being captivated by a good speaker, but on further reflection realizing how little content was conveyed, is a case-in-point. You lose the important signal of audience engagement with your ideas if you dazzle them through charisma. Without charisma to charm your audience, all you have left is whether your audience was engaged through the quality of your ideas. So in this sense being a good speaker is in fact in opposition to developing good ideas--you're losing meaningful signal regarding their quality.

This set of posts actually serves as an interesting counterargument to what I interpreted your thesis to be. As I understood it, you feel that writing gives you more time to organize your thoughts, facilitating accuracy and depth more than speaking does. Good speaking, on the other hand, or at least the kind of "good speaking" that refers to being good at captivating an audience, necessarily involves ad-libbing a lot of the details, which means you can't expect to come up with sentences that are as well worded (which usually means as precise or concise) as those you would have delivered in writing. Therefore, writing is the superior medium for delivering information. Period. Speaking is better for things like letting people see you in person (if you're famous) or sometimes better for inspiring people to take action, which you suggest are themselves important, but that speaking is inherently worse than writing for the purpose of conveying information. Am I correct so far? I apparently incorrectly extrapolated that you felt that it's intellectually superior to be a good writer than a good speaker.

Now what was I talking about this discussion serving as a counterexample to your argument? Well, first of all, I agree with everything I think you said up until the conclusion that writing is always more effective than speaking for communicating information. As we saw from this misunderstanding, the written word doesn't provide the author with the live audience feedback that the spoken word does. If multiple readers are confused, the author has no recourse because he does not know that they are confused. Thankfully they can now post comments on the Internet. :) A good speaker, on the other hand, is so in tune with his audience that he knows when they are confused or when his tone seemed misinterpreted, and he can adapt on the spot, providing more examples or changing the inflection of his voice to clarify his tone. George Carlin, one of my favorite comics, was excellent at crafting his routines, but from what I've heard from people who saw him live, was atrocious at interacting with the audience because his written style didn't allow him to deviate from his script. Nevertheless, this afforded him the planning and precision of the written word, and it worked great for him. In fields besides comedy, the written word's advantages naturally win out over the spoken word more frequently, but don't discount good speaking as an effective way to deliver information. Great speakers sometimes get an audience to understand actual content (I've seen multiple speeches were Bill Clinton did that, as well as several TED talks that did) as or more effectively than great writers do.

This statement seems to me to be profoundly wrong.

Perhaps some ways of "playing soccer well" depend little on having good ideas. But soccer is a very complex game: the configuration space of the players on the field is ~2*11 dimensional per team (add the z dimension for jumping and the ball in the air and you see that the total coordinate and momentum space is even vaster than 44 dimensions). Good teams are capable of organizing into configurations on the fly which are more likely to lead to goal than other configurations, and they can do this in response to the configuration of the opposing team. The Spanish team that won the most recent World Cup is a great example of 11 players who self-organize into optimal configurations in real-time.

You might argue that some players can use pure athleticism to navigate through the 44+ dimensional space and score goals. Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona are great examples: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYet49BToLw. They share a unique build which is suited to their style of soccer playing. They are not tall, have a low center of gravity, they can accelerate and pivot very quickly, and still they have a high top speed. That allows them to make runs like those "Goals of the Century" in the linked video in which they single-handedly beat the opposing team to a score.

However I would still hesitate to say that Messi and Maradona don't need good ideas to make those runs. Exactly where they choose to run probably depends strongly on where the defenders are relative to the ball-carrier's position. Also how fast they choose to run at any moment can depend on how fast those defenders are moving--hence the utility of pivot moves. Watch Messi beat the defender that comes at him from behind at 36-37 seconds, shown from another angle at 48-49 seconds; Messi gives the illusion that he has eyes in the back of his head. But really he has played soccer so much that he can take one glace around the field and calculate which defenders can reach his position and how fast they must be moving and in what direction in order to do so. This is not a trivial calculation to do at the rapid speed required by the game.

One of my favorite positions to play is Center Midfield. This midfielder often has more control than any other player to influence to configuration space of his team. One of my favorite players to watch do this was the brilliant Zinedine Zidane. He was a technically gifted footballer, but that's a relatively small part of why I loved watching him. The main reason is because of his perspicacity and decision-making skills. It is not just as if he has eyes in the back of his head; it is as if he can see the game as we spectators see it, with a birds-eye view. His brain is closer some kind of soccer video game AI that can calculate the optimal place to put the ball based on current configuration of the 22 players.

One of my favorite matches was Zidane vs. Brazil in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvYlvkWpPy4. Check out what Zidane does at 2:05-2:20. France is already up (on a Zidane assisted goal), so they do not need to score a goal. Still they would rather keep play near the opposing team's goal for the chance to score again and to decrease the likelihood of Brazil equalizing. So Zidane is basically playing keep away for the win. At 2:14 Zidane makes a hand gesture, directing a teammate into the space to his right. Brazil players respond, moving towards the space. Then he makes a pass in the completely opposite direction, which is probably what he planned to do all along. Possession is maintained by France and the clock ticks closer towards their victory.

Truly beautiful.

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

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

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

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

"As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much."

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

"But here again there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better."

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

Though the difference in meaning between what you claim I said and what you're able to quote me as saying may seem small to you, there is a critical difference between them: what you claim I said is false, and the sentences you quote are true. I think we both agree on that. Or do you think any of the sentences I actually wrote are false?

I agree with the person you responded to that your essay did come across as having as an undercurrent that good speakers tend not have as much depth in what they say. What you say about spending time on delivery coming at the cost (sometimes!) of content makes sense when I think of politicians and salesmen. I'm don't agree when it comes to more cerebral settings.

[1] edit: Changed "It appears..." to "Your.." because your essays are well thought out and purposeful. It's not just an appearance.

[2] edit: Added the word "may".

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

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

You didn't say "trying to be a good speaker pushes you in the opposite direction of having good ideas"; you said "being", which implies some kind of essence / gift. You are effectively saying, in this sentence, that the gift of speak hinders one's ability to produce good ideas.

Can you give examples of any specific sentences or passages I wrote that you believe to be false?

  > Having good ideas is most of writing well.

  > (...) it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered
  > in speaking than writing.

What you're suggesting may apply to your personal approach to writing and speaking. As you mention, you feel much more comfortable expressing your thoughts as essays. That's great. There's absolutely no further conclusion we can draw from that.

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

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

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

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

===

You're both right and talking passed each other. Writing and speaking both have their flourishes. Writing has constructs and techniques that are not strictly necessary just as oration does. There are also factors besides the content that affect the results of both mediums: writing something in my notebook does not have the same effect as posting it to my blog. So, as far as the tools available, writing and speaking are on the same level for recording and sharing ideas.

However, people are more susceptible to spoken word. There is a reason that poetry is read aloud. This can be used for good or evil but it does encourage people to spend more time preparing for the "flourishes" of speaking than the content.

I don't think anyone in this thread fundamentally disagrees with those statements :)

Your #1, at least, applies to both speaking and writing. In fact I'd think it applies more to speaking. Think of teachers and lecturers who can explain things with analogies on the fly, vs. those who just repeat things at the same level.

I think it is far rarer to see a flashy writer than a flashy speaker. Malcolm Gladwell is the only one that springs to mind. I think it's actually very hard to pull off as a writer.

This is precisely because of the 'other channels' you mentioned. It's very easy to spot someone trying to pander in writing, where in a crowd you get swept up in the general agreement of the crowd, it's an effective tactic that you often can't pull off in writing.

OTOH people who like him tend not to like Dave Eggers, and vice versa. I personally love Dave Eggers.

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.

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).

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.

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).

You can adapt your style to an audience - dumb down technical details to focus on the "big picture" capabilities and limitations, or get down to the nitty-gritty. But if you are talking to a crowd that just doesn't care about any of it, you've lost the minute you walk into the room.

(n.b. I have issues with hesitation noises myself occasionally. When I have the opportunity I watch / listen to tapes of myself, count influencies, and avoid things that cause that number to spike, because improving on this is a priority for me. For example, the worst I ever did last year -- TwilioConf -- had 1/20th the incidence of my typical performance in middle school, and on good days you wouldn't be able to tell I'd actually struggled with this.)

[P.S. This is going to sound a little fluffy but it is absolutely true: one of the first steps is to stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them", because that identifies a specific issue which can be fixed by an identifiable behavioral change, rather than solidifying an identity around features of past speeches you may have made.]

Watching the first video, I could see how distracting the ums and ahhs were. Watching the second video gave me a stunning insight. What felt like years standing silent as I struggled to suppress the um and continue my speech, actually came across as measured pauses. Not only did the pauses almost always appear 'normal', but they also made it easier to understand the points I was making.

In that one 15 minute session with my teacher, I became comfortable with pausing and that was the starting point for a dramatic decline in my umming.

As long as we're on the subject of hacks: pick three people in the audience: one on the left, one in the right, and one a bit off center in the middle. Always make eye contact with them when you are speaking. Rotate every couple of sentences. BAM, perceived confidence goes way up.

Not fluffy at all: this is a core part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) & it's very powerful.

Totally agree.

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

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

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

Some languages actually have a syntactically-distinct informal mode; English has the word um.

Why do I tell this random anecdote? The usual reason: I love to ramble. But also because my point is: Stop worrying about the "ums". They're fine. Your listeners were probably already interpreting them as a sign that you've become really engaged in the conversation.

(Now, of course, the above comment will be added to the YC FAQ, and teams will be competing to see how quickly they can get PG to utter the first um of the entrance interview. ;)

---

[1] At least, this is what informal teen speech sounded like years ago. These days, it may be different. It usually is.

This is interesting, but I doubt it applies to when people do it when speaking in front of a large group of people. Public speaking tends to require a lot more cognitive resources than answering basic questions from supervisors.

:-)

You are in great company, just watched a couple of videos of Elon Musk and Donald Knuth. They are also expert um'ers but everyone keeps listening because the message they are broadcasting is interesting.

He spent years retraining his accent, reading Webster's, practicing day in and day out. To this day he can't even successfully fake the accent of his youth. My best guess as to what he sounded like comes from his brothers, all of whom have a rich rural accent to this day.

As part of his effort to get over his shyness and his accent, he joined several public speaking clubs. While they helped with his accent and his shyness, they also taught him a great deal about hesitation noises and he's passed on two things to me (which of course I didn't truly appreciate until years later when I had to get out and start talking in front of groups).

1) Hesitation noises are usually just a way for our brain to catch up with our mouth, interestingly and helpfully, it's also a way for an audience's brain to catch up with their ears.

2) It's funny becoming aware of them, it's like suddenly becoming aware of breathing, it's very automatic, and when you start to think about it, the first thing you do is take a deep breath. The same with ums and ahhs, once you are aware of them, the first thing you should do is take a deep breath instead of saying them.

The audience will be glad for the pause, they'll have time to absorb the complex thought that you are in the process of putting together anyways. And you'll have time to put it together.

If the deep breaths aren't your thing he also recommended I turn my "ums" into "mmms" and then the next step is to turn the voiced "mmms" into a silent outbreath through my nose with my lips in the "mmm" position. It doesn't make a distracting noise and the effect is a thoughtful pause.

It's worth pointing out that the first sentence is very extraverted. In fact, if you read between the lines a bit, this is a very extraverted post. That's not bad. It's just that it's always interesting to note how extraverted introverts (myself included) can be without realizing it. Vice versa for extraverts.

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.

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

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

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

I must have gotten the wrong message from that essay. It seemed to me that from about the third paragraph onwards you were itemizing the bad things about good speakers.

When we need to expand our ideas to the masses, however, the focus becomes less on what the idea is, and more on how it's delivered. Preying on emotion, sequential logic, and subliminal notes, sometimes even the worst of ideas are promoted as good ideas.

In accordance with the last point of your essay, I'm not sure either, that speaking is used more for good. But if that's the case, now that we have so many people with good ideas, perhaps it's time to focus on delivering good ideas, and making the world better that way. (hmm... I just had an idea)

An idea is a signal. It's difficult to send complex signals over long distances while maintaining fidelity. We have to focus on the delivery. So we engage our audience emotionally to get them to listen and repeat messages we want people to understand. Subtle abstract notions are even difficult to deliver at close range. How difficult would it be to deliver one to a crowd without adding more energy (emotion) or simplifying it.

We shouldn't always blame people for not understanding. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing things the way we do them.

  > It's just alarming to me how little being a better
  > speaker depends on making your ideas better.

However I do think that spending some time thinking about how to present your ideas in oral form can indeed help to improve them.

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...).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/v437/n7058/abs/nature03... 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)

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.

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

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.

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.)

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..."

"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."

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.

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.

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

Anyone familiar with that assertion and remember its source? Perhaps I should have had someone whisper it to me in a strange accent.

"

"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.

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.

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.

Now that you say that, I gotta agree. Hearing him talk, I had no idea he used so many colorful metaphors and analogies. His essays don't quite have the color his talks have.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The effect of a talk does not have to "disappear rapidly" after the talk is over. That is why you will find lots of old Jobs keynotes on youtube, because they are still very powerful, and useful, interesting, educational, and motivating even when the products discussed are no longer being sold.

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.)

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).

It's just that when you see comments like these -- "I noticed that" or "me too" -- you so rarely see "and then I wondered why, and here's what I found…" as a follow-up.

The conversation is poorer because "I noticed" is where it ends.

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 ;) )

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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

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.)

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.

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? :)

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the money quote.

EDIT: fixed formatting.

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Discussion_...

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.

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.

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).

"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.

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.".

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.

"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.

Clearly PG has never read Ulysses.

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... :)

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.

We're all only human.

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

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... 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.

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

Is this a Myers Briggs thing? (NP vs SJ?)

You're obviously a bright person, so your strong negative reaction has me fascinated.

1. Which statements in the essay dont hold up to rational inspection? I liked the essay, but maybe intuitive personalities like me are easily hoodwinked by clever writers and if so I'd like to understand it.

2. If I write a similar article, and cite pg's essay, will my essay be more compelling than his because I referenced another writer? It never occurred to me that citations make an idea more correct, although the idea does remind me of something Joseph Goebbels once said.

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody questions it, so I question it.

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

Just sayin'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, for one, cannot take you seriously for this reason.

Take the quote "Having good ideas is most of writing well."

My reaction was "that's an interesting belief", and I stopped to think about it. It seemed plausible, and that was enough for me to move along. I knew he was setting up an intuitive frame in order to make a larger point. I didn't bother to agree or disagree with the statement because I knew I could circle back to it if it was crucial to his major point. Even after all this debate, I feel no need to agree or disagree with the statement. I'm perfectly satisfied feeling that it is plausible.

Now I'm going to stick my neck out, because this is the part I'm trying to understand:

Perhaps you view statements like that as an attempted declaration of scientific fact. From that perspective, it's perfectly reasonable to respond "Woah cowboy, slow down! Either break this down for me or at least cite some references here, because that's a provocative statement". I bet that if pg had also written an essay on "Ideas and Writing Well", even that is a citation you would find useful, it wouldn't have to come from Aristotle.

Apologies if I am guessing wrong here, but if that is the way you view it: you are not wrong, I am not wrong, and pg is not wrong. We're just viewing the same statement differently.

I'm willing to bet that this is a subject pg has considered deeply. And from his perspective, I'm certain his statement is true. The criteria for "good writing" is definitely an opinion, and his is probably a well considered opinion. Your opinion could even be diametrically opposed, and that wouldn't make either of you wrong. It would just mean that you disagree. And that's perfectly OK.

It was your comment about the lack of references that hit me like a punch in the nose. From my perspective, that seemed to come way out of left field. But in retrospect, it could be a totally valid question when viewed from another perspective.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Reading your comment is a totally superior experience to reading pg's essay. You explained your viewpoint. You reasoned it out. You backed up your views. You didn't make seemingly unconnected bald statements with a single sentence and then moved on.

If pg has thought deeply on the subject, it's impossible to tell. He doesn't "show his work" at all. He doesn't explain how he came to a conclusion (unless you consider one speaker ever that he referenced), or give illustrations. He certainly doesn't try to bring you around to his way of thinking.

He also doesn't use words like "It seemed" or "I believe" or "the way I see it," or "from my perspective." Certainly there is no indication that he ever questions his own motives or beliefs.

BTW - when I wrote "references," I wasn't necessarily talking about research (except when I specifically said studies or research). I'm talking about evidence of thought process, justification, reasoning, any kind of investigation, internal or otherwise.

Public speaking didn't arise out of the late part of the 20th century, it's a tradition thousands of years old with thousands of years of opinions on it. It's extremely facile to simply declare it to be the bastard stepchild of writing (of course speaking came first), with little more value than appealing to the "mob" of the audience, without even acknowledging or disputing this history.

The whole essay is not argued at all, but a collection of bald statements (which I list above) which must be swallowed wholesale in order to continue reading.

It's "pure" exercise in a priori reasoning (although we don't see any reasoning).

But whether speaking has value or not is not something that can possibly yield to a priori.

Scott Berkun puts it more eloquently than me:

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/on-writing-vs-speaking/

The thing that pisses me off isn't that I believe we're talking about facts -- although, of course, that's the way pg states things because he (mis)uses classic style -- but the sheer lack of argument. The whole essay hinges on several statements which are presumed to be true, and without which, none of the other points make sense. Begging the question in action.

I don't think that statement is adequately supported.

"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).

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.

"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.

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

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

That is a pretty epic switcheroo.

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

You asked for statements I believed to be false. I took this to mean statements I didn't believe. Because you didn't argue any of the effectively. I consider them false until well argued -- and the statements I called out hadn't been backed up even in a cursory way.

No amount of arguing with me over what I believe is going to change that fact.

You are very skilled at turning the tables in an argument, bravo. Your essays would be a million times better if you would do it to yourself instead of taking the lazy route.

I find when a thread gets to the point where someone is arguing about the meanings of fundamental words like "false," nothing good is ever going to come of it. So if you don't mind I think I'm done here.