Writing and Speaking

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.

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.

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.

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...).

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.

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.

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 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."

"

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

"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