Speaking vs. Writing | HAPGOOD

I?m not bad at speaking, but I?m not great. My writing has always been stronger than my speaking. Like a lot of bloggers, I have a constant stream of sentences I?m writing in my head as I think about things, and they form not presentations, but written words on the page.

So maybe that?s why this post from Paul Graham?really resonated with me:

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.

And:

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 could spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it.?[2]?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.

I generally do the same thing as Graham here. I start with the density of the written word, and hone it down. The better speeches I have given have been ones where I?ve had the time to memorize the words so that I could get a flow and ad lib a little off that. You have to strip out the complexity, simplify it, give it emotional punch. I know this, and yet I struggle with it. If people leave without the nuance, I feel I?ve failed.

What?s odd to me is that writing suffers from little of this. Even the shortest blog post can sometimes convey the sort of complexity that escapes the TED speaker. And unlike speeches, posts don?t suffer from the impulse towards aphoristic summary. And what I fear is that we are moving from a culture that used to get its summaries from five-page book reviews to one that gets its summaries from TED talks.

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Source: http://hapgood.us/2012/09/01/speaking-vs-writing/

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