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<title>Paul Graham Essay Summaries</title>
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<div class="page-header"><h1>Writing and Speaking</h1></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, you’re not supposed to write out a speech before hand because it’s harder to engage with the audience, but then you don’t have time to think about how to say things well.</p>
<p>Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. You can only spend a short amount of time thinking about any given sentence, whereas when you read you could pause and take time to reflect. Plus a sort of mob mentality develops in a crowd where you’re influenced heavily by the reactions of those around you.</p>
<p>So writing is better than talks as a source of ideas. But talks are good because they let you see someone you admire in person, and mainly because they’re a good way to provoke emotional reactions and to motivate people.</p>
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