10 ms·

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 Gra

• philwelch 15y ago
  > 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.
  • o1iver 15y ago
    Well then he should have said that and not tried to argue that people who can speak cannot think!
    • pg 15y ago
      Can you tell me the sentence where I claimed that?
      • o1iver 15y ago
        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.
        • pg 15y ago
          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?
          • yequalsx 15y ago
            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".
          • o1iver 15y ago
            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.
      • apl 15y ago
        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?
        • pg 15y ago
          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?"
          • apl 15y ago
            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.]
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      • bambax 15y ago
        > 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.
• ThomPete 15y ago
  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 http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/derrida.html
  • pg 15y ago
    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.
    • drostie 15y ago
      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.
      • drx 15y ago
        Characters with speech habits are not necessarily a bad thing -- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak (warning: tvtropes link)
    • dingfeng_quek 15y ago
      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.
• pg 15y ago
  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?
  • apl 15y ago
    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.
    • pg 15y ago
      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?