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Comment by quartesixte | Hacker News Reader

This resonates.

As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).

You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.

But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking/writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.

It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.

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I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.

But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

> If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.

(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)

I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years, as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at teaching the language, but did get us to read the script and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0] despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not having prayed for maybe 15 years.

[0] https://myislam.org/surah-fatiha/

Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have known and used this for millenia.

The difference between your experience and mine is that I have no idea what the verses are saying! They almost never pop into my head because I can't relate them to situations.

It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.

Yes, understanding can help memorisation. I was merely arguing against understanding being _necessary_.

Memorisation without understanding often ends up producing things like Mariah Carey's classic hit "Ken Lee".

So?

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.

May I ask why? I as an atheist did memorize some part of the Bible for the fun of it but I understand the language.

In Islam there's a certain reverence for memorizing the Quran, unlike in Christianity.

In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a point of pride.

This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.

Another part is that there is the belief that there are rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels iirc.

Because it is important to me as a Muslim. Also it is challenging, interesting, to try and memorize an entire book.

... but wouldn't it make to learn classical Arabic alongside with that?

> I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.

So yes, it can be done, but also: why?

Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.

Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.

It's good.

I totally agree. I've spent time learning several poems of Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Spell of the Yukon, The Men Who Don't Fit In) because I've enjoyed reading them. Now, I don't need a book, I just recall one from memory any time I like. I'm not an actor so I had none of the techniques that they would use to learn lines. It was purely rote memorization through repeated readings and recitation.

I agree, but I think it does depend on what the objective is. If preserving the literal accuracy of the source material is important, then memorization deserves it's bad rap and is worthy of much criticism.

That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.

On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.

> "Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express."

That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.

This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they would walk from room to room and recover memories, for example to tell very long stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory

Also covered in the more contemporary book Moonwalking with Einstein with its discussion of building one’s own “memory palace.”

Also referenced a number of times in the excellent Hannibal series.

Also in the series The Mentalist.

And Sherlock.

Worth noting that India's oldest poetic/litergical traditions, the Vedas, were transmitted orally for at least 1500 years, and developed elaborate systems of memorization and pronounceation to ensure they passed down (almost) unmodified.

In Mauritania there is a village where most people who lived there are blind. This is how they learn to memorizw the Quran which is more than 600 pages, each have 15 lines.

I'm sure it's a tradeoff. Like adding a disk to a computer that only had RAM.

You have access to many orders of magnitude more data, but it is substantially slower to access it.

All considered, I'm glad we did the upgrade.

Similar to how using flash cards doesn’t really help in developing that deep understanding… but the action of making them sure does.

Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called Hafiz memorize the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid, that the entire written copies either physicallly or digitally of the Quran are completely destroyed, it can be recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered a living miracle since no other holy book has this crucial feature and it is also well known that even the Pope do not memorize the complete Bible.

Nitpicking Alert!!!

The Pope Should be more concerned about the Gospel, I think.

The Catholic church could use a Bible memorisation contest to pick their new Popes. They don't. I presume for good reasons?

I sincerely hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but this seems like a worldly solution to a Godly problem. Is the God in the Quran not sovereign? Why would He need humans to protect the Quran?

Again, not a critique, just a curiosity.

Because even when you’re all powerful, it’s hard to find good help

Why would any almighty deity need humans to do anything at all?

This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.

(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)

There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)

> Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)

That's addressed in Job.

Yes. And that's just one way to address a part of this topic of one (or a small number of) religions.

There's different answers, even amongst the same religion, but even more across religions.

Btw, you might like https://unsongbook.com/

The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.

To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.

After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.

Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.

The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.

> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.

I see what you're saying, but that's literally the point. Jesus was hardcore, but that's because he had a mission.

Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

Be nice. Be better. Do your best. Apologize when you mess up. Grow.

If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

Anything else is part of some hokey religion masquerading as spirituality.

> Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

You get in because you're predestined to? Sounds pretty simple to understand.

Or go to heaven because of faith alone, if you subscribe to a different strain of Christianity.

Or go to heaven because of faith and good works, if you subscribe to yet a different strain of Christianity.

Or any number of other interpretations you can find.

I don't think your homebrewn theology is necessarily better (nor worse) than the other guys' versions.

> If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

I'm not doing anything at all, and God hasn't told me anything ever. So I guess I'm good by your interpretation?

Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

> Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

More importantly, none of the gospels were created during his presumed lifetime.

(For the Christian tradition this seems like a minor difference, but we are exactly talking about oral vs written preservation and transmission here.)

Homer's works are an interesting parallel, because they are believed to have been transmitted orally first, before being written down later.

Correct, the gospel was originally spread by word of mouth.

Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.

A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.

Perhaps too much of a digression for this forum.

Any reason to assume that common folks in the Roman province of Judea were preached to in Greek?

As to the actual gospel you may be interested in this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus

> but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what

You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient" that is. :)

I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.

We have left one on the moon! https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/07/19/the-only-bible-o...

I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.

Also convenient that the church leaders 350 years later chose the correct books to put in the Bible when they canonized it.

That's what divine inspiration is for.

The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.

Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.

Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].

Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].

[1] https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/48:

"We have revealed to you [O Prophet] this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them."

[2] https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/82

"Do they not then reflect on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies"

[3] https://quran.com/en/al-hijr/9:

"It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it."

[4] Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5lrPL2vWJG6Th9zmh1...

The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.

But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:

Isaiah 40:8

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Matthew 5:18

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

The Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGSJ) has also been memorized by some people. It’s much rarer than in Islam, but the GGSJ being written in verse with defined melodies/meter helps with memorization. It is much longer than the Quran though, and there isn’t as much emphasis on memorizing the whole thing (the daily prayers are commonly known though).

and further complicating the situation is people like me who write not to re-read, but understand, which then helps to memorize. Circle complete!

I'd add to those the necessity to have some distance from the material to avoid the recency effect. You can have that distance either because you'll be talking about something you haven't worked on for at least a couple of weeks, or because you've developed an ability to retain a birds eye view and adopt an outsider's perspective even when you're in the weeds. A lot of academic talks go wrong because, although the speaker deeply understands their topic, that teeny tiny detail that they were fiddling with yesterday is really not the thing they should try to communicate today, but they can't help themselves. Yet ask that same person to talk about their previous work, and you'll get a high quality impromptu introduction to the field.

A few years ago, I came into the orbit of a public speaking coach, and he and I worked together for a few weeks. Your comment fascinates (and reassures) me, because he was emphatic that I had to abandon my own natural way of speaking entirely, and adopt a "persuasive persona" that sounded to me like a Saturday Night Live parody of a TED talk. This has exactly the opposite of the intended effect, because any anxiety I felt about speaking was multiplied by my anxiety about how I sounded and "staying in character". By comparison with the linked post, however, I was attempting to stay in a character that I didn't understand, with no thought given either to understanding what I was saying or, crucially, understanding who I was speaking to.

This got me thinking about the people who find value in his style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they didn't care about understanding the material and, in some cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through it.

This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person, someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the room away. Something about pretending to be someone else unlocks so many actors.

This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who want to understand the material and the audience and simply speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a superficial level.

I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

> This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding.

This is my experience as well, and ironically mirrors my time as a manager. I want to understand and empathize with people, and there are managers and orgs who absolutely don't want that, and want the "people who sound like they're selling you a car"

Yeah I heavily disliked most public speaking coaches at institutions precisely because of this.

FWIW, I mostly coach juniors at work who will brilliantly describe their current project to me at their desk but then fall apart in the conference room in front of peers and seniors. Mostly it's because they're trying to recite some prepared speech that doesn't sound like they normally talk (often desperately trying to impress the room). So I tell them their mastery of the material will impress the room and you sound plenty fine when explaining it to me at your desk. I don't have a full semester of instruction time to make them develop a style -- I have one hour the day before the meeting. So it doesn't produce great political orators. But it does help produce people who can walk through some deep technical work in front of their bosses.

>AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

And love that character too. That takes some self discovery, experimentation, and practice. Which is why I referred to it as a great effort.

Addendum: To give some credibility to my method, I often point out to them that they sound their best when speaking during data reviews. These are sessions where, following some kind of test, engineers gather to review sensor outputs. You have no time to prep a speech -- these are quickly assembled within hours of a test and are very much often just a loose collection of screenshots and quick annotations and the engineer in question usually spends that time copy pasting screenshots or driving back from a test site.

But once it's their turn to talk about some really obscure looking line graph, they will deliver some great, great public speaking. Why? They've spent the last 6 hours staring at this graph and know deeply how to interpret it.

By the way, this has given me reason to believe that Investment Banking decks largely are just to force junior associates to undergo the above process.

This doesn’t make much sense: actors don’t write their material, they are given it. They can’t write like they speak, and also they can’t improvise

Actors (especially big names) can and do improvise all the time, in almost all movies.

It's rare they say all lines exactly as in the script. In fact often the script gets updated with ideas that came up during shooting including improvised lines.

A fascinating topic around my family is the playwrights who insist that the play be delivered precisely as written, most of whom are the same playwrights who refuse to allow genderswapping roles (even innocuously), updating pop culture references, etc. They are not the norm, and pretty much everyone understands that performance is as much a part of the creative act as writing, with all the deviations and imperfections that suggests. And that's without even getting to the idea of consciously changing the script midstream that you mentioned.

That's why in almost all cases screenwriters or source novel writers are strictly forbidden on set.

The biggest problem are writer/directors who cannot deal with improvising actors. Like a Haneke, who would turn around in his grave if an actor goes against his sacred script. That's why they have 25 shots per scene, and 3-6 months per shoot.

Harrison Ford says, "I know," instead of "I love you, too" (or something like that) in Empire Strikes Back's carbonite freezing scene. That's an immensely significant and meaningful update.

Just because you hear that they do, doesn't mean it's always allowed or that it will make it into the film.

Sometimes a line just isn't working and an actor or the director or the writer or a grip will come up with something that works and that's what you hear about. Those are exceptions and not the rule.

The director has the final say. Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

I didn't say it's "always allowed". There are difficult directors with very specific vision they want to express 100%. It's that that is the exception and not the rule, however.

In general it's more common that some lines will change and be improvised by the actors, than not.

It's even practical, some lines come off as stiff when the actors tell them verbatim, others just can't be replicated in a longer emotionally charged scene (where the flow and the emotions carry the performance), and so on.

>Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

DUH!

Yes, but sometimes, I think the director might ask for the script to be delivered exactly as written

If you watch any side by side of a film audio / final and the script you'll realise what you're saying simply isnt true.

It's very rare that a conversation scene mirrors the dialogue exactly 1 to 1. Obviously there will be certain lines where the director wants exact delivery but actors very often deliver a slightly different line than as written.

If anything this frequency increases the higher level of profile / skill the actor has.

There are countless examples where a director is asked about scenes and defers the credit to the actors for improvising something particularly well or coming up with a better line to convey the same point - they are the ones, after all, in charge of personifying the character that was written. They may feel a different delivery suits the character better.

For actors it's slightly different, but the whole "becoming the character" part is, to me, the "writing like they speak" part. By fully inhabiting the character, they will be compelled to speak in the manner written in the given situation.

And as the other comments mention, actors very often do alter the lines. Behind the scenes footage and interviews with actors reveal this often happens because they think the screenwriter/director got it wrong in that particular moment -- that their character wouldn't respond like that.

The Han Solo example is a good one. Hours of takes saying "I love you too" and then Harrison Ford has a flash of clarity and realizes Han would NEVER respond like that. Calls for a quick take, "becomes Han Solo", says "I know" and the rest is history.

I've been described as a good communicator and public speaker on several occasions. I have also felt that I have improved this aspect of my life tremendously as the years have gone by. I also noticed that what used to be a rather...impeccable or "by the rules" writing style...has morphed into a much more "writing what you would speak/recite" style.

For a long time, I felt annoyed at the fact that my mom (who teaches language) would rightfully find more and more problems with the way I wrote. I felt as if I was losing some of my younger qualities (I was always considered a pretty good writer).

Now, though, I have realized that it's exactly as you described: I accidentally started writing as I talk — and that has morphed the writing into this sort of weird stream of consciousness thing with its own rules, ebbs 'n' ibbs. Most people who know me like what I write because they feel as if I'm talking with them via text. My personality is there. And as someone managing both bits and people, personality and the associated gift of energy is perhaps the best thing I can give my team.

I try to counteract this perceived reduction in quality by practicing my other passion: writing poetry :)

I don't understand what does the "writing and speaking should be the same" thing is supposed to achieve for public speakers.

It means that if your speech is written in the way you casually speak, it's easier to remember it (since you'll not have to remember fancy words or turns of phrase that you wouldn't normally use). The idea being that it's easier to remember or reconstruct speech that comes natural anyway.

It will also be easier to improvise and fit the tone if you forget what you were supposed to say.

Aside from the above, which are about memory, it's also good for making it natural: you'll sound more authentic/natural speaking as you normally do, than trying some fancy speech, and it will also be easier to add off the cuff remarks that also fit the tone, like an idea that occured in the moment, or to respond to something that happens just before/while speaking.

This would only work for actors bring able to play themselves, and nothing else. The screenplay is not always written for a specific actor, there are strange lines there that you have to transport naturally. There is where the method helps.

play different personalities.

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