March 2012I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I haveto pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a betterspeaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish Iwere a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas,and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being agood speaker.Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you'retalking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll beperceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite:having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a goodspeaker.I first noticed this at a conference several years ago.There was another speaker who was much better than me.He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward andhalting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usuallydo. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of theother guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized hehadn't said very much.Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more aboutspeaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas matteredin speaking than writing.[1]A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely abetter speaker than me, but a famous speaker. Boy was he good. SoI decided I'd pay close attention to what he said, to learn how hedid it. After about ten sentences I found myself thinking "I don'twant to be a good speaker."Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas,but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction. For example,when I give a talk, I usually write it out beforehand. I know that'sa mistake; I know delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder toengage with an audience. The way to get the attention of an audienceis to give them your full attention, and when you're deliveringa prewritten talk, your attention is always divided between theaudience and the talk — even if you've memorized it. If you wantto engage an audience, it's better to start with no more than an outlineof what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. Butif you do that, you might spend no more time thinking about eachsentence than it takes to say it.[2]Occasionally the stimulationof talking to a live audience makes you think of new things, butin general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writingdoes, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you want.If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can getasymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speakingad lib. Actors do. But here again there's a tradeoff betweensmoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk,you could instead spend making it better. Actors don't facethat temptation, except in the rare cases where they've written thescript, but any speaker does. Before I give a talk I can usuallybe found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out onpaper, trying to rehearse it in my head. But I always end upspending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I giveends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed outand rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because Ihaven't had any time to practice the new bits.[3]Depending on your audience, there are even worse tradeoffs thanthese. Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they liketo be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. As youdecrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker isincreasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That's true inwriting too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Anygiven person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader.Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking abouteach sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk canonly spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hearit. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactionsof those around them, and the reactions that spread from person toperson in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort,just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Everyaudience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Partof the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker atthat conference was that everyone else did.[4]So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the writtenword as a source of ideas. But that's not all talks are good for.When I go to a talk, it's usually because I'm interested in thespeaker. Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get tohaving a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn'thave time to meet individually with all the people who want to meethim.Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It's probablyno coincidence that so many famous speakers are described asmotivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is reallyfor. It's probably what it was originally for. The emotionalreactions you can elicit with a talk can be a powerful force.I wish I could say that this force was more often used for good thanill, but I'm not sure.Notes[1]I'm not talking here about academic talks, which are a different type of thing. While theaudience at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they will (orat least should) make a conscious effort to see what new ideasyou're presenting.[2]That's the lower bound. In practice you can often do better,because talks are usually about things you've written or talkedabout before, and when you ad lib, you end up reproducing some ofthose sentences. Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talksare made of spolia. Which feels a bit dishonest, incidentally,because you have to deliver these sentences as if you'd just thoughtof them.[3]Robert Morris points out that there is a way in which practicingtalks makes them better: reading a talk out loud can expose awkwardparts. I agree and in fact I read most things I write out loud atleast once for that reason.[4]For sufficiently small audiences, it may not be true that beingpart of an audience makes people dumber. The real decline seemsto set in when the audience gets too big for the talk to feel likea conversation — maybe around 10 people.Thanks to Sam Altman and Robert Morris for reading draftsof this.
