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Writing isn’t speaking
Posted at: Jan/23/2013 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Behavior, People, Society,
I’m not a very good speaker. By Toastmaster standards I say “um” too many times and periodically pause to regroup when I lose my train of thought. Nevertheless I accept teaching and speaking challenges often. I wish I were a better speaker and that is probably why I put myself in front of groups. I don’t wish I were a better speaker to the same magnitude that I wish I were a better writer. It is interesting how time, experience and insight change our perspectives and goals. I have for years admired those people who could get up on the stage and command the attention of the audience. Good speakers seem to have their audience hanging on their every word. Much like a good comic, their timing and inflections seem to bring everything together. I have no interest in leading a revival meeting, but there is something special about being able to take the microphone and with confidence speak to a large group. Being an engineer, I am in a large community of people whose marginal writing skills have often been overlooked in favor of our ability to digest, analyze and solve complex problems. Nevertheless I took it as a personal challenge a few years ago to become a better writer. Having avoided writing for many decades, this was a substantial leap for me that came with the fear of significant embarrassment. For a little over 3 years I have been producing an essay nearly every week. I honestly, and maybe a little arrogantly feel my writing has improved quite a bit. Knowing what I know now, I plan to revisit some of my older essays and clean them up: But I am still not a very good speaker. I came to the conclusion recently that I was not as interested in being a good speaker as I used to be. What I really want is to have good ideas and be able to share them with others. Experience has taught me that good ideas are a much bigger part of being a good writer than they are of being a good speaker. Having good ideas is the foundation 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: I have come to realize that good ideas are an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker. I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was a morning speaker who had the podium at the beginning of the day. He spoke well and the 800 people in the room seemed to be following his every word. Later that day we broke into smaller groups and I led a seminar for roughly 40 people. I kept mentally comparing myself to the first speaker of the day and felt certain that I had fallen drastically short of his standard. As I usually do, I critiqued myself while driving home still focused on a comparison. Without finding any great revelations I switched to analyzing what the first speaker had to say, it didn’t take me long to realize that he hadn't actually said very much. I suppose this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about speaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas and substance mattered in speaking than writing. I have been paying more attention to speakers and their techniques since then. Of many examples, recently I got to listen to someone considered a great speaker. In truth, he was really good, and had the audience riveted. Afterwards we all moved into a reception hall to enjoy drinks and finger food. As you might expect, everyone was talking about the speaker and how good he was. I personally didn’t get it, though I chose to keep my opinion to myself rather than create an arguement! I kept going over his talk in my head; there were no new ideas, no great revelation and no special initiatives. Clearly, his talk was inspirational, but not enlightening. This is when I came to the realization that inspiration is more important than insight when speaking. Since then I have found myself thinking “I don’t really aspire anymore to be a good speaker.” I love ideas and facts. Being a really good speaker appears to be not merely orthogonal (90 degrees) to having good ideas, but in many cases, in the totally opposite direction. When I speak I want to be sure to get my key points and ideas across. The good news is that I don’t write out my entire presentation in advance. I know that’s a mistake; I know that delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with the audience because my attention would be on my written words. Years ago I did try memorizing a speech; this unfortunately still left me too focused on individual words, rather than whether I had the attention of my audience. Most of my speaking these days is done from a bullet list or presentation. I periodically look at the list to remind myself what is next and ensure I am getting all my content out in a logical sequence. This technique is better than memorization, but lacks the ability to fully engage the audience. If you end out spending too much time on any one thing, you have to chop time from other things. There is an important point here; “I believe that facts and key points matter.” The opposite of this would be to fully engage the audience while not being a slave to your key points or the clock. The only way I have seen to accomplish this is by not actually having many if any important ideas to share. I am aware that if you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can appear to be speaking ad lib. Actors do this all the time with scripts. For me, every time I read my notes I find something I want to change or enhance within them so the opportunity for memorization is simply not there. Unfortunately, working off bulleted lists or presentations has me periodically looking to see what is next; the result is another “um.” 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.” This is true with the written word as well, but the descent is much steeper with the spoken word. History repeatedly shows us that any given individual is dumber as a member of an audience than as an individual reader or listener. Each member of the audience only has as much time to digest a sentence, as it takes to hear that same sentence. Before their thoughts can go too deep, they have another sentence flying at them for rapid and likely cursory processing. Good speakers manipulate this by including jokes and other distractions. An audience is a borderline mob where everyone is affected by the behavior and reactions of the people around them. A good speaker will leverage this mob like behavior. There are a lot of jokes I will only laugh at in an audience because I am drawn into participating in laughing with everyone else. Clearly, telling a well-timed joke can inhibit an audience from paying attention to the next sentence. Despite all this, I don’t feel talks are useless. They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas and facts. I still go to talks and speaking engagements periodically because there is other value to them. Talks for me are more about the speaker than the content. Listening to a famous person speak is likely to be the closest I will ever get to having a conversation with them. If I was given the opportunity to listen to the president speak, I would go. Despite not agreeing with much of what he does or says, he doesn’t have the time to meet with me individually and this would be the closest we would likely get to a conversation. Clearly talks are a motivating thing to do. It is probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be the true purpose to public speaking. The emotional reactions you can elicit with a good speaker can be a powerful force. I just hope our public figures know how to use this force for good and not ill. I have not completely given up on speaking events; I just recognize that it is a skill that does not fit well for me. I am going to focus on continuing to improve my writing skills. I like to digest ideas and be able to reread key sentences at my leisure. I have never been very good at marching with the crowd anyway; I keep being a nuisance and wanting to know the reason why.
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