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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.

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

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

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

I agree with that. Good writing should sound like spoken language. One of the classic mistakes of beginning writers is to use excessively formal diction, e.g. to use connectives like "furthermore" that they'd never use when speaking.

Well, it depends what you're writing. One of the horrible things about early fiction is that the writers usually insert their own interpretations of how characters talk -- including stuttering and "ums" and whatnot. Thankfully much of this is wasted on fanfic, where you know what the author was trying to emulate -- but usually it's a distraction. Great characters can get by without habits written into their dialogue.

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

If you restrict writing to only the "sounds" words produce when they are read, good writing should sound like spoken language is still hard to defend. Besides how the brain differently processes words seen from eyes, the varied methods of reading (reading linearly, scanning, searching, etc) gives multiple definitions of "good writing", depending on the context, goal, reader, and many other factors.

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

> 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.

Well then he should have said that and not tried to argue that people who can speak cannot think!

Can you tell me the sentence where I claimed that?

You didn't say that per se, but I felt it in the undertone of the whole essay. See some of these sentences:

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

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

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

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

I try to make the strongest claims I can that are true. If I believed something as extreme as what you claim I said, I'd say it. Which means if I didn't say it, I didn't say it.

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

I don't know you personally. I've read the majority of your essays. Your essays are well thought out and that what you write is purposeful. However, it isn't entirely unreasonable to think that you may[2] you have conveyed something in your writing that you didn't intend. Such a thing must occur occasionally.

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

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

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

I understand and agree with you, so I will take back that statement and simply say that that was my impression and not what was actually meant.

Perhaps if you had been explaining this on stage instead of trying to write it down it would've been more clear. ;)

Here is an important tradeoff between speaking and writing. Writing allows the user more room to color the information with their own experiences. For example the words "a very long time" conjures up some concept for a reader -- but when a listener hears "a very long time" from an old person versus a young person they may hear those as two different things. It's important and possibly absent information here that "if [you] didn't say it, [you] didn't say it." Inference is an incredibly powerful tool of persuasion and used often.

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

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

You don't claim that, of course, but something of similar intent is implied in this paragraph:

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

A charitable reading of this section is "I've observed a correlation between vacuousness and effective rhetoric." What I (and presumably others) gathered is "Clarity of thought and rhetoric ability, pick one." Both seem either misguided or wrong.

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

I don't see how you think that passage implies "people who speak [well] cannot think." All I'm saying is that speaking well depends little on having good ideas. That doesn't imply people who speak well can't have good ideas, just that they don't need to.

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

Now you're putting a spin on that passage that's simply not in the text. Quit the contrary: it's the opposite of what your essay seems to be suggesting.

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

Why would you think that if rhetoric ability and good ideas are fully orthogonal? It'd amount to "The dude on stage is a brilliant speaker, which has nothing to do with inventiveness and clarity of thought, so I don't want to be a brilliant speaker." Nonsense. A much more reasonable interpretation is:

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

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

[EDIT: Slight rephrasing.]

I think you have a point that "I don't want to be a good speaker" implies something negative about being a good speaker. In context it can be understood as being a good speaker is in opposition to the goal of having better ideas. Perhaps a less controversial phrasing would be "I don't want to put forth the effort towards becoming a good speaker".

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

You're right; if I wanted to be sure I couldn't be misinterpreted, I could have put it in something like the way you suggest. But I felt like a reasonably intelligent person with no axe to grind would understand what I meant. You always face this tradeoff in writing. If you hedge every statement so carefully that it couldn't be used by someone determined to misrepresent you, you end up with something that resembles a statement by a corporate PR department.

As a reasonably intelligent reader with no axe to grind (and who, on the contrary, really enjoys reading your essays), I too was under the impression (and had no reason to question it until seeing your comment) that you were arguing that writing is an objectively better medium for conveying what I'll call ponderable information (as opposed to information that would obviously be best transmitted through spoken word, such as "get me a decaf latte with two sugars" or "there's a bear behind you") than speaking is, and that being a good writer is more important (or superior in other ways besides importance) than being a good speaker. If the latter was not your intent, please don't kill these four messengers and assume we're just bad at reading. We're simply telling you that that's how your essay comes across, at least to some readers.

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

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

The point was that before I watched this speaker in action, I still retained some of my naive belief that being a good speaker depended a lot on having good ideas. So when observing the super-duper speaker in real time confirmed what I'd noticed after the fact about the pretty-good speaker at the conference, I was more sure of it.

"Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas."

This statement seems to me to be profoundly wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

Truly beautiful.

Meanwhile, the ability to choose a color for a bikeshed depends little on having good ideas....

I think he meant it as a quick example and wasn't really an indictment of soccer players - nevertheless your obvious passion and understanding of the game is appreciated :)

Wow, it’s great to see someone with an appreciation of soccer tactics on HN!

Your last paragraph about Zidane is interesting. Keeping possession is a bigger tactical advantage than many people previously thought. Imagine an entire team playing keep-away for the win, patiently building up to goals confident they will get them, and you essentially have Barcelona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6A_K8oWqfk

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

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

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

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

Actually, a far more direct "charitable reading" of that is:

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

An additional possible inference from the article is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You seem to be attributing to me a lot of beliefs I don't hold.

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

Two key passages:

  > Having good ideas is most of writing well.

Disagreed. Written style matters, and whenever it doesn't matter, neither would it matter in spoken form. Your writing style happens to be lean, concise, reduced. But that doesn't just happen -- or are all your essays first drafts? Would they work as well in flowery prose?

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

Disagreed. I think I've got a grasp on your basic point: that the effective or required ratio of flashiness to content is invariably higher in talks than it is in essays. In the general case, that is of course not true; flashy but relatively superficial essays evidently exist, and (as you admit) academic talks can exhibit remarkable SNRs. But I'd go further and say that your rule of thumb rarely if ever applies in a meaningful way. Rhetorics are crucial in both media, and communication of ideas isn't the sole purpose of verbal interaction -- be it written or spoken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those that did not catch it: #1 used a metaphor to prove the point that using metaphors is not superfluous. golf clap :) The question is: did the metaphor take away from the point? Absolutely not. In fact, it helped to solidify it.

===

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

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

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

Are those really commonplaces? Because they are both false. Having good ideas is equally important for speaking and writing well. And you can be snowed in multiple media.

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

Why is it 'of course not true'? pg's stance seems the far less controversial one than yours to be honest.

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

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

Tom Robbins. Everyone seems to think he's a genius, but I can't get past the sense that he's a show-off.

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

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