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March 2012  
  
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when
I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I
were a better speaker like I wish I were 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 a good speaker.  
  
Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking
about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having
a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an
alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.  
  
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 and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like
I usually do. 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.  
  
Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about speaking,
but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered in speaking than
writing.   
  
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."  
  
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's a mistake; I know
delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. The
way to get the attention of an audience is to give them _your_ full attention,
and when you're delivering a prewritten talk, your attention is always divided
between the audience and the talk — even if you've memorized it. If you want
to engage an audience, it's better to start with no more than an outline of
what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. But if you do that,
you might spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say
it.  Occasionally the stimulation of talking to a live audience makes you
think of new things, but in general this is not going to generate ideas as
well as writing does, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you
want.  
  
If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get asymptotically close
to the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. Actors do. 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. Actors don't face
that temptation, except in the rare cases where they've written the script,
but any speaker does. Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a
corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my
head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead.
Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed
out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't
had any time to practice the new bits.   
  
Depending on your audience, there are even worse tradeoffs than these.
Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like to be swept off
their feet by a vigorous stream of words. As you decrease the intelligence of
the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good
bullshitter. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper
with talks. Any given 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 about
each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as
long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an
audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the
reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are
disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through
walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good
speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the
good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did.   
  
So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word 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 the speaker. Listening to a talk is the
closest most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the
president, who doesn't have time to meet individually with all the people who
want to meet him.  
  
Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It's probably no
coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational
speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It's probably what
it was originally for. The emotional reactions 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 than ill, but I'm not sure.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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