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?