It's a bit too easy and somewhat condescending to brush off public speaking as strictly inferior to written communication. In fact, I disagree strongly with Graham's stance. Sure, pure information transmission is enhanced in written form: there's less noise, the reader can skip and backtrack at will, and so on.
Speaking, however, gives you many more channels, and I refuse to consider these channels (inflection, speed, choice of words, prosody, emotionalization, what have you) mere baggage. Also, it's deceiving to propose that essays are baggage-free. Good style makes a huge difference, even in writing. Compare the great essayists to lowly part-time bloggers: the difference rarely boils down to just ideas. Delivery matters. Emotional content, something Graham appears to see as noise, distorts and enhances in written and spoken form alike.
All in all, I find it a bit too convenient that a mediocre speaker and good essayist happens to think writing is simply the better medium.
Derrida thought a whole lot about the spoken word vs. writing.
According to logocentrist theory, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism asserts that language originates as a process of thought that produces speech, and it asserts that speech produces writing.
> 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.
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.
I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier.
I have seen many great speakers in person (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Steven Covey) and almost always come away underwhelmed. I struggle to understand why the audience gets so worked up with so little content transferred. I have trouble with comedy clubs because so many people howl at stuff I think is lame.
On the other hand, I find tech talks that would bore my friends to death incredibly interesting. I've seen pg speak several times and I really enjoyed his talks. I even like the "ums". They tell my subconscious to pay attention because I'm being treated to something real-time and genuine that has never happened before and may never happen again.
Oddly, my favorite tech speaker in the past few years was Reid Hoffman. He sure doesn't look like a professional speaker; he paced back and forth and mumbled with his head down. But I was afraid that if I dropped my pencil, I might miss something that could change my life. Now that's what I call a good speaker.
"I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience."
I agree with most of your post. But I'd actually invert that relationship. A good speaker is someone who understands his audience, so that he can maximize both his connection to it and his impact upon it.
The intent of speaking, and the intent of writing, aren't altogether different. In either case, a typical goal is to convey information to an audience, and to maximize the audience's uptake of that information. Uptake naturally follows from conveyance, and successful conveyence depends upon successful connection (or "breakthrough"). So, it stands to reason, knowing one's audience is a necessary precondition to engaging one's audience. Some audiences are tougher to engage than others. And what necessarily breaks through for Audience A may fly right over the heads of Audience B, or piss off Audience C, or strike Audience D as a joke.
This distinction is important to make, because too many people write or speak primarily for themselves. They assume a hypothetical audience of likeminded people, and they blame the audience when their words don't hit their marks. This mindset is so prevalent that the exclamation "Tough crowd!" has become something of a cliche. It's true that some crowds are "tougher" than others, but the failure to engage a particular crowd usually lies mainly with the speaker or writer. (Even when it doesn't, it's best to assume it does; assumption of failure provides a useful lesson, whereas blame deferral offers no room for growth).
I work in an academic setting and most of us use writing to convey our ideas and use the speaking opportunity to advertise the things we have written about. So a good academic speech needs to have low idea density to serve its purpose. It should only present the core ideas to get the audience interested in reading what you have written. I am sure if pg starts to see his speeches performing a different function than the writings he will enjoy the speaking assignments more.
When I heard PG speak at PyCon last weekend, I hardly even noticed any 'ums' - in fact, it wasn't until I saw it raised on HN that I remembered it. I was thoroughly engaged in his ideas, and my mind likely used those pauses to process what he was saying.
I dunno, I think the definition of "good speaker" really depends on the audience. I probably speak for many here as an introverted, deeply introspective outlier.
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.
I think one can be a great communicator without being a great speaker. True passion for a subject comes through, even if a person says "ummm" a lot. It might be harder to be a good "listener" than a good speaker when it comes right down to it.
I wouldn't say that I'm a good speaker, but I'm certainly a much better speaker than I used to be. It's not just about transmitting a certain number of bits of information per minute; it's also about making sure that those bits are being received at the other end. I often throw jokes (and quasi-jokes, like my "purpose of cryptography is to force the US government to torture you" line) into talks as a way to help keep the audience's attention; and I watch the audience for signs that I'm moving too fast or too slow for them.
But for all of this, I don't think the material I convey has suffered in the slightest. One audience member told me that my cryptography-in-one-hour talk was the "most densely packed hour of information" he had ever seen. If being a good speaker pushed me away from having and conveying good ideas, my talks should have been getting progressively less informative, not more so.
I posit that while PG is seeing a real effect, it's not the effect he thinks he's seeing. Rather than style detracting from substance, it seems to me that there's selection bias: In order to be invited to give talks, you must have at least one of {good ideas, good style}. As a result, those talks which are completely devoid of interesting ideas are inevitably given very well -- we never see talks which are given by poor speakers who have no interesting ideas. This in no way means that speaking well is responsible for the lack of substance.
Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse. (I said in the first paragraph that I wished I were a better speaker. Why would I wish for that if I thought it made your ideas worse?) It's just alarming to me how little being a better speaker depends on making your ideas better.
Speaking and writing are more different than they seem. It's actually a different medium, and so a transcript of a great speech will often seem weak, just as a reading of a great essay may seem flat. Too much is lost in translation, which I think may the problem PG is encountering -- he first writes an essay and then translates it into a speech. Imagine a painter who creates a great painting and then tries to translate it directly into music -- will he be frustrated by the limitations of the medium?
To me, the power of speaking is that it temporarily creates a shared reality where the listener can actually be in the mind of the speaker. Several people here have mentioned hearing PG speak and finally understanding the sense of curiosity that produces so many of his ideas. Maybe the idea itself isn't quite as clear, but the inspiration that lead to the idea is more obvious, and that's often just as important (teach a man to fish...).
I like to think of it in terms of communication bandwidth. The written word is low bandwidth, but if executed well, theoretically the ideas can be consumed more succinctly. Radio would be the next step up the spectrum, adding implied emotion into each word.
Video is next, and it's what I actually care about. I think if done correctly, like a really thorough, honest, well reported 60 minutes piece for instance, you get closer to being in the mind of the subject than you do in any other medium. Hearing someone say a quote, while watching them squirm (Clinton, Gates, etc.) give you a good idea of who someone is better than any other situation, except public speaking / one-on-one convos.
Web video isn't really doing a good job of this yet, and I think it's related to PG's idea that the writer of a script should spend all his/her time making the ideas better, while the actor can focus on the presentation layer.
If it were easier / had a shorter feedback loop to author the presentation / video layer, and the content layer were what was taking up the majority of the time, we could see more interesting video. Right now, the render / capture / upload / publish loop is so long, that it's just too difficult to meaningfully experiment in video as information, as opposed to video as entertainment, which is why YouTube's success has a foundation of quick funny bits, and not some informational underpinning.
PG walks around at the end of his article, but doesn't say it outright.
Giving talks is about leading. Be it rallying the staff, conveying a vision, or providing an update, the main thing is to inspire, connect, motivate and direct. Some very self-motivated people hate talks because they already have what they need in that area and would prefer just a document of instructions. Most people, however, appreciate good leadership and appreciate talks.
Talks are for implementing ideas.
Conversation is for understanding and generating ideas.
Writing/thinking is for generating ideas.
False modesty aside, I am a very good public speaker. Doing debate in high school, I had an undefeated regular season, as in not losing a single round. I say this just to point out that I'm not a mediocre public speaker championing the written word.
Paul Graham is right, but it depends more on context than he suggests:
Speaking about a technical subject, you want to communicate the ideas themselves. The emotional content in this case is noise. Paul suggests in the notes that academic talks are more immune to this, but having been to quite a few academic talks and given a few myself, I still find them quite inferior to written papers and one-on-one conversations. True, people can still inject the emotional appeals in papers or conversations, but they tend to get more easily noticed and filtered by the reader or listener without the spellbound effect.
Political debates are perhaps an exception. When you watch a presidential debate, you're not only looking for the president with the best ideas, but a president you believe has the leadership capacity to carry them out. You might personally want the president who has the best ideas, regardless of how charming they appear on camera, but like it or not, a lot of that leadership rests on personal charisma.
This may be particular to the field of biology, but I find biology talks to be much more interesting than papers. One contributing factor is that important papers in Science and Nature are subject to stringent length limitations. This limits the writer's ability to unfurl a coherent narrative. Oftentimes, years of research are condensed into a handful of figures and sentences that cannot convey the more subtle points of the argument (for that the reader is directed to the supplementary information, which is often many times longer than the actual paper).
On a more macroscopic scale, talks also allow scientists to highlight deeper themes that are often lost in the minutiae of a technical paper. This is especially important in biology because we want to find universal paradigms from experiments done on model organisms. A talented speaker can distill the most important themes from a body of research in a way that writing rarely achieves.
In summary, talks are a great medium for conveying conceptual narratives. In biology talks, the important assertions are almost always backed up by a slide that shows real data. However, if I am an expert in a particular subfield and really want to get into the details, of course I'll go read the paper.
It feels to me that PG is simply making excuses for not preparing for his talks. There is no reason technical talks can't be fun, engaging, and full of information. If you only read it out loud once, you're not doing enough prep. Sure you could do a funny talk, which sounds great and doesn't have substance. But it's not a zero sum game.
Don't read your talk out once, read it outloud a dozen times. Don't present it unpracticed infront of the conference hall, present it in front of friends / coworkers first.
Speaking and writing, the two, are a major way that programmers get to be known. It's important that we learn to communicate clearly in an engaging way with our community. If you're having trouble, take a monologue class at your local theater.
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.
I think pg seems to have confused great speakers with great entertainers. The mark of a great speaker is one who conveys complex ideas with (apparent) ease, not simply one who engages and entertains the audience. While those qualities are certainly helpful, unless the audience comes away with some level of understanding, in my opinion, the speaker has failed.
A great speaker distills ideas and arguments down to their core essence so they can be easily absorbed. While, in the speaker, this may not be a source for ideas, it should be a catalyst of ideas for the listener. In this, the speaking is superior to that of the written word. This is especially true if you are in a room full of people who approach you after when it could quickly turn out to be a source of ideas for the speaker as well.
Further, all the issues pg seems to have with speaking could just as easily be applied to writing. I have read more nonsensical fluff wrapped up in a entertaining package than I care to admit. The written word is just as powerful at selling snake oil as the spoken one.
The only talks I find useless are for subjects I know well. However I have seen some fantastic talks on topics that I knew nothing about which sparked ideas I would not have had otherwise. I have given talks that have likewise provoked a lot of discussion which helped me refine my own ideas.
Maybe pg is just going to (or giving) the wrong talks. Or maybe he underestimates how good of a speaker he is.
I've learned that there is a difference between being a good speaker and being a polished speaker. PG isn't very polished - there are tons of uhms and some inherent awkwardness to his talks, but I still consider him a very good speaker. With his awkwardness on stage comes some natural sense of charisma. The audience laughs, feels engaged, and is glued to the speaker wondering with anticipation what he's going to say next. At the end, everybody is very happy for having heard the talk, and I don't think anyone ever feels bored during it.
I expect with a few lessons it would be fairly easy to add polish to those talks if it becomes necessary (e.g. running for office, etc.)
Yes to your first sentence; I'm not sure about the rest.
I couldn't help but feel this essay was in response to an earlier HN thread where his speaking style was criticized a bit for its unpolished nature & being essentially "un-listenable to" on a podcast somewhere.
IF that is the case, then he seems to have missed the point that no matter how much good content you have, if you are so unpolished that you can't deliver the message effectively, you almost may as well not talk.
"no one, uhm, is, uhm, going to, uhm, sit still for, uhm, and hour and a half, of, uhm..."
An opinion by Nassim Taleb on the subject (posted on his facebook page):
"I have been told by conference organizers and other rationalistic, empirically challenged fellows that one needs to be clear, deliver a crisp message, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Or speak with the fake articulations of T.V. announcers. Charlatans try sending authors to “speech school”. None of that. I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to slightly unaudible, less clear. Acquire a strange accent. One should make the audience work to listen, and switch to intellectual overdrive. (In spite of these rules of thumb by the conference industry, there is no evidence that demand for a speaker is linked to the TV-announcer quality of his lecturing). And the most powerful, at a large gathering, tends to be the one with enough self-control to avoid raising his voice to be noticed, and make others listen to him."
One of my favourite perks when I worked at the Guardian is that any employee can go along to the morning editorial meetings. They were absolutely fascinating - a 40 minute meeting where the editorial direction for the day's newspaper is fleshed out, by an extremely smart and well informed group of people, with absolutely nothing dumbed down.
One of the thing that really struck me about those meetings was how Alan Rusbridger, the newspaper's editor, set the tone. He has a relatively quiet voice, and as a result the room stayed quiet enough that you could almost hear a pin drop. When he spoke, everyone listened intently. This influenced the whole meeting - people never spoke over each other, everyone paid full attention and a huge amount of information and discussion was covered effectively in a very short space of time.
I've been trying to find it to no avail, but I read somewhere that listeners are more apt to remember something if they required effort to hear it, almost as if the work it took reinforced the memorization of it.
Anyone familiar with that assertion and remember its source? Perhaps I should have had someone whisper it to me in a strange accent.
The following was a real eye-opener for me, as I always thought from someone's speech, you could infer how much mental horsepower they had [1]:
"
"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.
"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."
We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
pg, I may be alone in this, but I think your talks, even when read out verbatim, have an extra dimension that is missing in your essays. When you speak, your curiosity and sense of humor come through strongly.
You like to use writing to explore radical new ideas, and to this end, you refine your essays to have as few qualifications as possible. On the page it sometimes comes off as arrogant. But with your voice, I can hear you proposing these ideas for the sheer delight of a new perspective... the tone says "what if we thought about it this way?"
Also, I'd like to slightly disagree that when one is in an audience, one's critical thinking goes down. It's a matter of knowing how to focus your attention. When I watch someone speak, I'm looking for the unintentional parts as much as the intentional. Where does the person smile and feel relaxed? Where do they seem stressed? What's their body language saying? For a geek metaphor, think of that part in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where he describes how certain people have the ability to "condense fact from the vapor of nuance". This gives a whole other channel of information to engage your analytical mind, so watching a speech can become like reading.
I agree 100%. I used to feel the exact way about Paul's writing (it seemed arrogant), then I heard him in person and from that point on always had a different and much more positive impression of him.
Paul is right that being a good speaker is not about making your ideas better, but I don't think being a good writer is much different (perhaps the bar is lower since it's not live, and there are less judgements to be made of the person themselves), to be a good writer or a good speaker you need to be able to keep people interested and convey ideas clearly.
> When you speak, your curiosity and sense of humor come through strongly.
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.
I find it interesting to contrast this to the requirements for the YC application video:
Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message.
Footnote 2 seems relevant. I'd guess that most YC application videos are also made of spolia.
My late senior partner was a world-famous (in our field) speaker and writer and leader. He'd be 88 years old now. He was old-fashioned in many ways, and insisted on telling us newbies exactly how he did public speaking, so that we could do likewise:
1. He wrote out every word, in the type of language he would use in conversation. The resulting "script" was double-spaced, with Python-like line breaks and indentations to signify the pauses he wanted.
2. Then for rehearsal, he read the entire speech aloud, to himself, ten times, practicing the cadences and the emphases he wanted, editing as he went. He said that reading the speech aloud to himself was critical, because that's what embeds the phrases and cadences and emphases in something like muscle memory.
He would also sometimes say that Churchill's supposedly-extemporaneous remarks were the product of enormous polishing and rehearsal.
I saw Paul speak at the first Startup School in 2005, where he literally read his talk on stage from an essay he held in his hand. I saw him again at PyCon 2012, and he's improved a lot. But this article makes me think that he still sees speaking as a kind of poor delivery mechanism for an essay. They're really different beasts.
I recently read an essay by an advisor to Mario Vargas-Llosa's failed campaign for the presidency of Peru. Brilliant writer, bad speaker. [0]
Being one of the greatest writers alive, Vargas-Llosa was good at giving voice to the people's dissatisfaction and ideas for how to solve them. But he failed at the other half of political communication: repetition. He was always racing ahead of the electorate, speaking on his latest ideas. He was bored with the thought of repeating himself. He never developed the habit of the stump speech, and left his constituents behind.
In the influence game, one is eventually faced with a tradeoff between being a thinker who raises the upper bound, and being a communicator/popularizer who raises the median. Thinkers are needed, but if their ideas race too far ahead they languish until a popularizer takes them up.
There is a middle way: continue your writing as before, but use the stump as a trailing indicator of your thought process. There is no dishonor in giving audiences an expanded version of your thoughts as of a few essays ago. Don't worry that the ideas aren't "new". Definition, then repetition.
Also, learning how to be an engaging speaker at the same time as trying out new ideas is hard. Keeping the ideas constant can help you become a better speaker more quickly than you might think. And repeating yourself can even lead to better thoughts in directions you don't expect.
[0] Mark Malloch Brown, "The Consultant", Granta #36
Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do something.
For example, Steve Jobs keynotes made you go to the Apple Online Store and preorder the latest products; Bret Victor in his "Inventing on Principle" talk makes you rant about the current state of IDEs.
The effect of a talk disappears rapidly after the speaker has left the stage. In contrast, a written text stays.
"Speaking is not about information transmission. Speaking is to make people do something."
I couldn't have put it more succinctly myself.
Motivation is speech's primary function. Getting you to vote, or buy something, or work harder, or learn something. Everyone who is trying to get a group of people to do something is using speeches at some point.
Speaking is also about changing minds and hearts. Persuasion works much better in person than in print. There are studies to this effect.
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.
This raises an interesting issue of what I will call "the lender" effect.
In an old business where I had to apply for loans I was always in contact with the bank officer. Never the person who made the decision which the officer called "the lender". If I got the loan I would hear the "the lender approved" if not the opposite. "The lender" could have been a person or a group who knows.
Anyway I remember thinking about that and I came to the conclusion that the bank may have been purposely separating the person wanting the money from the person who could make the decision about giving money. Why?
Because (I think) "the lender" just looked (read) at the cold hard facts. Their opinion of whether to loan money wasn't colored by anything the person wanting the money said or of course how they appeared.
This more or less goes along with what PG is saying. The question is if this is the case (and I believe it is based upon years of this happening) it might explain partly the VC success rate. Since they put much weight on individuals and teams and not on the idea. Perhaps some of the weight they put on the teams is colored by rhetoric that they should be removing from the decision making process. (And yes I know the first thing people do in YC is fill out an app and then get to pitch.)
I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at is actually not very funny. Most people wouldn't normally laugh at the same things, unless they were really nervous. No doubt social proof is a big part of this: people laugh because others are laughing, as the essay says. Audiences are their own laugh track. But something has to start the ball rolling. I wonder if it's related to authority. The speaker is in an authoritative position, the audience is subordinate. One thing I learned from hypnosis is that most of us are a lot more ready to submit to authority than we seem - far more than we believe we are. If the speaker is known to be famous or powerful, the audience will automatically project this on to them; but even if they aren't, all they have to do is just assume a manner of authority and the audience will automatically project it onto them anyway. Then just about anything they say that is jovial will seem funny and the audience will laugh. And I bet if an audience laughs a few times, they go away saying "that was a good talk".
I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at is actually not very funny.
Isn't the very definition of funny is that it makes people laugh? Laughter is inherently a social, group bonding phenomena. Inherently, a social, group gathering will have more laughter. There is no such thing as something being objectively funny, funny only exists inside a group and social context, which provides the opportunity for the group to bond at someone's expense (possibly someone inside the group, possibly someone or something outside the group).
I've noticed this too - when speaking in front of my employees, they laugh at the strangest things - things that would not be funny if I said them at, for example, lunch.
Laughter is social lubricant. There is lots of research on this: people laugh more in groups; inferiors laugh more than superiors; nervous people laugh at themselves, and laughing at yourself is also kind of way to efface yourself and show that you are part of a group.
If only HNers would read basic Intro to Psychology books, there would not be so many chimes of "I noticed this too" and, hopefully, more discussion of what actually goes on in the world and how things actually work.
[+] [-] apl|14 years ago|reply
Speaking, however, gives you many more channels, and I refuse to consider these channels (inflection, speed, choice of words, prosody, emotionalization, what have you) mere baggage. Also, it's deceiving to propose that essays are baggage-free. Good style makes a huge difference, even in writing. Compare the great essayists to lowly part-time bloggers: the difference rarely boils down to just ideas. Delivery matters. Emotional content, something Graham appears to see as noise, distorts and enhances in written and spoken form alike.
All in all, I find it a bit too convenient that a mediocre speaker and good essayist happens to think writing is simply the better medium.
[+] [-] ThomPete|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pg|14 years ago|reply
Can you give examples of any specific sentences or passages I wrote that you believe to be false?
[+] [-] edw519|14 years ago|reply
I have seen many great speakers in person (Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Steven Covey) and almost always come away underwhelmed. I struggle to understand why the audience gets so worked up with so little content transferred. I have trouble with comedy clubs because so many people howl at stuff I think is lame.
On the other hand, I find tech talks that would bore my friends to death incredibly interesting. I've seen pg speak several times and I really enjoyed his talks. I even like the "ums". They tell my subconscious to pay attention because I'm being treated to something real-time and genuine that has never happened before and may never happen again.
Oddly, my favorite tech speaker in the past few years was Reid Hoffman. He sure doesn't look like a professional speaker; he paced back and forth and mumbled with his head down. But I was afraid that if I dropped my pencil, I might miss something that could change my life. Now that's what I call a good speaker.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonstjohn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] harold|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cperciva|14 years ago|reply
But for all of this, I don't think the material I convey has suffered in the slightest. One audience member told me that my cryptography-in-one-hour talk was the "most densely packed hour of information" he had ever seen. If being a good speaker pushed me away from having and conveying good ideas, my talks should have been getting progressively less informative, not more so.
I posit that while PG is seeing a real effect, it's not the effect he thinks he's seeing. Rather than style detracting from substance, it seems to me that there's selection bias: In order to be invited to give talks, you must have at least one of {good ideas, good style}. As a result, those talks which are completely devoid of interesting ideas are inevitably given very well -- we never see talks which are given by poor speakers who have no interesting ideas. This in no way means that speaking well is responsible for the lack of substance.
[+] [-] pg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul|14 years ago|reply
To me, the power of speaking is that it temporarily creates a shared reality where the listener can actually be in the mind of the speaker. Several people here have mentioned hearing PG speak and finally understanding the sense of curiosity that produces so many of his ideas. Maybe the idea itself isn't quite as clear, but the inspiration that lead to the idea is more obvious, and that's often just as important (teach a man to fish...).
[+] [-] randall|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rubidium|14 years ago|reply
Giving talks is about leading. Be it rallying the staff, conveying a vision, or providing an update, the main thing is to inspire, connect, motivate and direct. Some very self-motivated people hate talks because they already have what they need in that area and would prefer just a document of instructions. Most people, however, appreciate good leadership and appreciate talks.
Talks are for implementing ideas. Conversation is for understanding and generating ideas. Writing/thinking is for generating ideas.
[+] [-] kevinalexbrown|14 years ago|reply
Paul Graham is right, but it depends more on context than he suggests:
Speaking about a technical subject, you want to communicate the ideas themselves. The emotional content in this case is noise. Paul suggests in the notes that academic talks are more immune to this, but having been to quite a few academic talks and given a few myself, I still find them quite inferior to written papers and one-on-one conversations. True, people can still inject the emotional appeals in papers or conversations, but they tend to get more easily noticed and filtered by the reader or listener without the spellbound effect.
Political debates are perhaps an exception. When you watch a presidential debate, you're not only looking for the president with the best ideas, but a president you believe has the leadership capacity to carry them out. You might personally want the president who has the best ideas, regardless of how charming they appear on camera, but like it or not, a lot of that leadership rests on personal charisma.
[+] [-] rshe|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rabble|14 years ago|reply
Don't read your talk out once, read it outloud a dozen times. Don't present it unpracticed infront of the conference hall, present it in front of friends / coworkers first.
Speaking and writing, the two, are a major way that programmers get to be known. It's important that we learn to communicate clearly in an engaging way with our community. If you're having trouble, take a monologue class at your local theater.
[+] [-] forgottenpaswrd|14 years ago|reply
One of the most amazing things you see when people is bad at something is how they make excuses so they don't have to do the work. I have cached myself so many times making excuses. We tend to distort our world with fantasies.
This is like the people that are bad at meeting women, instead of admitting it and do something about it, they create excuses like "women love bad boy bastards, so because I want to be a good boy I don't want to meet women",in reality is more like "I don't want to accept that maybe just maybe they do something better than me I can learn from".
In Paul case it is "I don't want to learn to do better speeches so I invent the excuse: Doing better speeches will mean I will be a worse writer so I don't want to do it"
When you admit it is a temporal issue, when you are in denial it is permanent.
Could you tell me those speeches are devoid of content?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V57lotnKGF8
[+] [-] Aloisius|14 years ago|reply
A great speaker distills ideas and arguments down to their core essence so they can be easily absorbed. While, in the speaker, this may not be a source for ideas, it should be a catalyst of ideas for the listener. In this, the speaking is superior to that of the written word. This is especially true if you are in a room full of people who approach you after when it could quickly turn out to be a source of ideas for the speaker as well.
Further, all the issues pg seems to have with speaking could just as easily be applied to writing. I have read more nonsensical fluff wrapped up in a entertaining package than I care to admit. The written word is just as powerful at selling snake oil as the spoken one.
The only talks I find useless are for subjects I know well. However I have seen some fantastic talks on topics that I knew nothing about which sparked ideas I would not have had otherwise. I have given talks that have likewise provoked a lot of discussion which helped me refine my own ideas.
Maybe pg is just going to (or giving) the wrong talks. Or maybe he underestimates how good of a speaker he is.
[+] [-] coffeemug|14 years ago|reply
I expect with a few lessons it would be fairly easy to add polish to those talks if it becomes necessary (e.g. running for office, etc.)
[+] [-] jmadsen|14 years ago|reply
I couldn't help but feel this essay was in response to an earlier HN thread where his speaking style was criticized a bit for its unpolished nature & being essentially "un-listenable to" on a podcast somewhere.
IF that is the case, then he seems to have missed the point that no matter how much good content you have, if you are so unpolished that you can't deliver the message effectively, you almost may as well not talk.
"no one, uhm, is, uhm, going to, uhm, sit still for, uhm, and hour and a half, of, uhm..."
[+] [-] ckuehne|14 years ago|reply
"I have been told by conference organizers and other rationalistic, empirically challenged fellows that one needs to be clear, deliver a crisp message, maybe even dance on the stage to get the attention of the crowd. Or speak with the fake articulations of T.V. announcers. Charlatans try sending authors to “speech school”. None of that. I find it better to whisper, not shout. Better to slightly unaudible, less clear. Acquire a strange accent. One should make the audience work to listen, and switch to intellectual overdrive. (In spite of these rules of thumb by the conference industry, there is no evidence that demand for a speaker is linked to the TV-announcer quality of his lecturing). And the most powerful, at a large gathering, tends to be the one with enough self-control to avoid raising his voice to be noticed, and make others listen to him."
[+] [-] simonw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snth|14 years ago|reply
How terrible. This reminds me of so many boring, unclear, tortuous talks by grad students and faculty.
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|14 years ago|reply
Anyone familiar with that assertion and remember its source? Perhaps I should have had someone whisper it to me in a strange accent.
[+] [-] vgm|14 years ago|reply
"
"Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.
"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."
We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
"
[1] Foreword, The Quotable Hitchens.
[+] [-] neilk|14 years ago|reply
You like to use writing to explore radical new ideas, and to this end, you refine your essays to have as few qualifications as possible. On the page it sometimes comes off as arrogant. But with your voice, I can hear you proposing these ideas for the sheer delight of a new perspective... the tone says "what if we thought about it this way?"
Also, I'd like to slightly disagree that when one is in an audience, one's critical thinking goes down. It's a matter of knowing how to focus your attention. When I watch someone speak, I'm looking for the unintentional parts as much as the intentional. Where does the person smile and feel relaxed? Where do they seem stressed? What's their body language saying? For a geek metaphor, think of that part in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where he describes how certain people have the ability to "condense fact from the vapor of nuance". This gives a whole other channel of information to engage your analytical mind, so watching a speech can become like reading.
[+] [-] ry0ohki|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrewacove|14 years ago|reply
Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message.
Footnote 2 seems relevant. I'd guess that most YC application videos are also made of spolia.
[+] [-] dctoedt|14 years ago|reply
1. He wrote out every word, in the type of language he would use in conversation. The resulting "script" was double-spaced, with Python-like line breaks and indentations to signify the pauses he wanted.
2. Then for rehearsal, he read the entire speech aloud, to himself, ten times, practicing the cadences and the emphases he wanted, editing as he went. He said that reading the speech aloud to himself was critical, because that's what embeds the phrases and cadences and emphases in something like muscle memory.
He would also sometimes say that Churchill's supposedly-extemporaneous remarks were the product of enormous polishing and rehearsal.
[+] [-] jbellis|14 years ago|reply
I wrote a longer article about what goes into good public speaking for a technical audience over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3721333
[+] [-] aristus|14 years ago|reply
Being one of the greatest writers alive, Vargas-Llosa was good at giving voice to the people's dissatisfaction and ideas for how to solve them. But he failed at the other half of political communication: repetition. He was always racing ahead of the electorate, speaking on his latest ideas. He was bored with the thought of repeating himself. He never developed the habit of the stump speech, and left his constituents behind.
In the influence game, one is eventually faced with a tradeoff between being a thinker who raises the upper bound, and being a communicator/popularizer who raises the median. Thinkers are needed, but if their ideas race too far ahead they languish until a popularizer takes them up.
There is a middle way: continue your writing as before, but use the stump as a trailing indicator of your thought process. There is no dishonor in giving audiences an expanded version of your thoughts as of a few essays ago. Don't worry that the ideas aren't "new". Definition, then repetition.
Also, learning how to be an engaging speaker at the same time as trying out new ideas is hard. Keeping the ideas constant can help you become a better speaker more quickly than you might think. And repeating yourself can even lead to better thoughts in directions you don't expect.
[0] Mark Malloch Brown, "The Consultant", Granta #36
[+] [-] beza1e1|14 years ago|reply
For example, Steve Jobs keynotes made you go to the Apple Online Store and preorder the latest products; Bret Victor in his "Inventing on Principle" talk makes you rant about the current state of IDEs.
The effect of a talk disappears rapidly after the speaker has left the stage. In contrast, a written text stays.
[+] [-] padobson|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beza1e1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
In an old business where I had to apply for loans I was always in contact with the bank officer. Never the person who made the decision which the officer called "the lender". If I got the loan I would hear the "the lender approved" if not the opposite. "The lender" could have been a person or a group who knows.
Anyway I remember thinking about that and I came to the conclusion that the bank may have been purposely separating the person wanting the money from the person who could make the decision about giving money. Why?
Because (I think) "the lender" just looked (read) at the cold hard facts. Their opinion of whether to loan money wasn't colored by anything the person wanting the money said or of course how they appeared.
This more or less goes along with what PG is saying. The question is if this is the case (and I believe it is based upon years of this happening) it might explain partly the VC success rate. Since they put much weight on individuals and teams and not on the idea. Perhaps some of the weight they put on the teams is colored by rhetoric that they should be removing from the decision making process. (And yes I know the first thing people do in YC is fill out an app and then get to pitch.)
[+] [-] gruseom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bokonist|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] carguy1983|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|14 years ago|reply
If only HNers would read basic Intro to Psychology books, there would not be so many chimes of "I noticed this too" and, hopefully, more discussion of what actually goes on in the world and how things actually work.