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CertainlyWorse  No one is coming. It's just you.  1mo ago (text post)   1211 thread views

Speechcraft and Pithiness: Give your tips here

This isn't a large question. Because of the users we have here, I think we could all benefit from short sharp tips to edit our own words.

In this topic, can you provide advice on how to curate yourself when you throw words in speech and on 'paper'.

Links to 'speechcraft' sources are appreciated.

I'll start:

  • Take a second to think about how someone else would hear your words if they were you. (rule 0)
  • Curate and cut your words before you throw them.
  • "Brevity is the soul of wit" - Hamlet - Shakespeare.
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I don't think it universally applies to writing, but for public speaking, I feel quite strongly you should just jump right in to whatever you're going to talk about. Don't spend too long on an elaborate self-intro unless your story is inherently gripping, don't have a meta-chat about the circumstances of you being there to speak, just go right in and start strong. A lot of people seem to think that by being self-deprecating or acknowledging your nervousness out loud that makes it better, but that's only a temporary and low-quality self-salve. You're allowed up to two major flubs within the speaking block itself without anyone thinking anything weird about you, and if you want to be self-aware there and then, that's fine, but for the love of God do not begin speaking with it. Anyways, by deciding to launch right in you're already doing some self-curating unconsciously. There's also the nice side effect of slightly decreasing your "um" frequency since you've already started with a habit of being concise and to the point.

On the "looking for advice" side of things, I overuse parentheticals and parenthesis constantly (side notes like this that often become their own mini sentences) and I'm curious if anyone has had that issue and what the did about it (if it even matters, maybe it's fine and good!)

If you are an unironic autist (like me) do not be ashamed of writing down your words before you say them.

I would not be half the psuedo-normie that I am if I didn't write scripts for most of my difficult encounters.

Know when to not even try.

  • When you yourself aren't sure what exactly you're trying to express.
  • When your audience is unlikely to understand your point, be that for a lack of contextual information or a lack of time or attention or interest.
  • When your audience is unlikely to benefit from receiving your information, even if they understand it. Some things people would rather not hear.
  • When it would take you more time and effort to successfully convey your idea than you have.

t. "90% of my comments don't get posted, 9% I regret posting, and the rest doesn't matter."

Speak to your audience, not just your subject matter. Additionally, never blame your audience for not understanding your point.

A lot of (good) advice is spent on the importance of brevity, but not as much on what to abbreviate to.

This leads to people shortening their [huge list of extensive background material and supporting argument] to [things], which in turn often leads to speakers focusing on [summarizing the things] rather than [the implication of things]. Worse, people often abbreviate to [things[that are interesting to them]] as opposed to [things[that are important to the audience]].

It is your job- as the speaker- to communicate what they need. If they already knew it, you wouldn't be wasting everyone's time saying it.

Distilling information is critical, but so is packaging it in ways the audience will understand.

Sometimes you need to distill the same mass of information into points suitable for highly knowledgeable subject matter experts, and then take the same information and distill it for people with no technical expertise but general familiarity. Sometimes you need to do it yet again for people who are so unfamiliar they might as well be high schoolers. Entire lines of argument or categories of information may be worse than useless depending on the audience, but counterproductive by confusing them or giving them wrong impressions.

It is, in turn, your job- as the speaker- to know your audience, and how to communicate to them. If they knew what you meant, and not what you said, you wouldn't be wasting everyone's time by saying it.

Cut adverbs.

"Brevity is the soul of wit" - Hamlet

You'd believe that lunatic?

If this is a literary joke, I'll just skip past it.

The Brevity thing is the most important piece of advice about writing or speech. How much important information you can successfully convey in how little time is, IMO, the most important metric for the quality of any piece of language. Obviously a lot goes into it - how clear you yourself are on what you want to communicate, how well you understand your audience, and then your skill at composing the text itself.

And yes, there is some use for florid, extravagant language. It can entertain, for one. But if I had to choose between forever reading sweet nothings or just the briefest utilitarian messages - I could live with the latter.

The Brevity thing is the most important piece of advice about writing or speech.

Absolutely not! Good heavens.

As with many questions of this type, the answer to "how long should it be?" is always "as long as it should be". Sometimes that will be quite short, and other times it will be quite long. Context and purpose matter. When I'm looking up technical documentation at work, I usually do want it to give me the answer I'm looking for as fast as possible with little ado. But thankfully, people can write things other than technical documentation.

In general, if someone is a good writer, then we would prefer him to write more rather than less. More of a good thing is good! Saying that you prefer writing to always be as short as possible is a bit like saying that the best sandwich is the one with the least meat on it. We would have to assume that such a person is not much of a meat eater to begin with.

Not everyone is a lover of words, and that's fine. There are plenty of things I don't care about either. I have little taste for music, for example, beyond the most superficial enjoyment. Which is why I make no attempt to generalize my musical preferences into universally applicable strictures.

In general, if someone is a good writer, then we would prefer him to write more rather than less. More of a good thing is good! Saying that you prefer writing to always be as short as possible is a bit like saying that the best sandwich is the one with the least meat on it. We would have to assume that such a person is not much of a meat eater to begin with.

I'd consider it more akin to saying that a good pitcher is one who faces as few batters as possible per inning. It's not always true, but it's a very good indicator.

For practical writing, I stand by it - the quality metric is [information conveyed / effort spent to communicate by both parties].

For other writing, especially for entertainment - see my third paragraph above.

Other comments have already touched on what to say, but I think the most underrated and under practiced aspect of speechcraft is intonation and annunciation.

Think of your voice as a musical instrument. Consider singing lessons if you've never taken any. Playing wind blown instruments can also be helpful. Practice opening your throat, lifting your chin and pressing the words out with your diaphragm. Avoid monotone. Practice punchy delivery and learn to get visibly worked up when you're driving home an argument. Listen to the great audio book readers and podcast hosts for exemplars.

Humans are simple creatures. We respond to an excellent delivery in a visceral way. I would focus on this aspect until you master it before worrying about the other aspects. A sloppy speach with excellent delivery is better than a great speach and a poor delivery.

When I was taught public speaking in an old-fashioned English private school, this was summed up as "Look up, slow up, speak up."

This remains good advice. When I have to correct colleagues or family members on public speaking, speaking too fast is the problem about 80% of the time.

Listen to the great audio book readers and podcast hosts for exemplars.

Reading bedtime stories to children is remarkably good practice. They switch off if you go monotone. If you get good at it, children remember it to the point where extended family bedtimes get reorganised around your visits.

They switch off if you go monotone.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing in terms of bedtime stories?

Do you know of any simple techniques to practice this? Recording yourself speaking for instance might be low hanging fruit.

Low hanging fruit yes, but effective, at least in my view (not OP). I do know firsthand some people who literally saw a coach for improvement, and self-recording and review was part of what they did together even though they had live sessions -- you'd think that would make recording yourself moot, but not so.

However, much like how reading makes you a better writer, I think to some extent finding (and recognizing) good speakers and deliberately imitating some of their patterns is effective.

My best advice in writing is be as simple as you can be and still be accurate. The most powerful speeches are simple, and the same is true of writing, if you can get the point across accurately in three sentences, using more than that tends to make communication worse, not better.

Eh, I don't think that's always true, more words can make things clearer. For example, using examples is often helpful.

I mean yes, but at the same time getting overly verbose or going through multiple examples and hypotheticals to get to a point that is really simple for the median member of the audience to understand often means people start skimming through or in a speech tuning out. When something can be made clearer using an example, fine, but at the same time taking 5 paragraphs to make a point that can be explained in five sentences is not good writing.

For example, using examples is often helpful.

That's a beautiful piece of prose right there, and I mean that in all sincerity.

Thanks, glad you noticed! Yeah, I was pretty happy with it.

I don't have any expertise on this myself, but a movie analysis channel I really like (and which I think would appeal to most Motizens) did a few videos on oratory you may find helpful.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Ed5mFHaMkQ&pp=ygURbW92aWV3aXNlIG9yYXRvcnk%3D

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxw5U_0HaHM&pp=ygURbW92aWV3aXNlIG9yYXRvcnk%3D

I maintain a git repo about the "programmer dialect of English" that I use to teach my computer science/data science students how to not sound like a n00b/PHB. It's niche, but many people here are likely to fit into the niche.

The document goes over phonology / lexicon / grammar / discourse differences in programmer English vs American standard English, but to give you all a taste, here's the top of the phonology section:

  1. RAG (as in retrieval augmented generation with LLMs) is pronounced "rag" not "R-A-G".

    NOTE: The word "rag" has only one sylable and is faster/easier to pronounce than the 3-sylable "R-A-G". The practice of pronouncing abbreviations as acronyms stems from the programmer's desire for efficiency in all things.

  2. ICLR (a famous machine learning conference) is pronounced "I clear".

  3. PNG is pronounced "ping" and not "pee-en-gee". This pronunciation is specified in the standard.

    The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.

The word "random" should not be used as a synonym for "arbitrary." In particular, it should only be used when there is a corresponding distribution that is being sampled from.

But then RAM would be harder to say: AAM.

There is no good reason for [pronouncing GNU with a hard g] other than to make identifying outsiders easy

It's from a song.

The song came first, but I doubt Stallman or any of the fellow GNU folk had that song as an explicit motivation.

I gknew I was right!

It's also the pronounciation we use in the one true language, German.

Coincidentially, we'd appreciate if you anglo louts would also pronounce the word German itself correctly - with the hard G. And the a is an a, not an ä, so get your pronounciation of that in order as well.

It's definitely P-N-G and not "ping", imo.

The G in GIF is pronounced like

I tend to pronounce it with a 'y' sound. This can create problems with programmers since they tend to prefer yiff GIFs.

I’ve started using the buzzing G sound from “menagerie”.

Wait, you say "I-S-O", not "iso"? How can you not pronounce the international standards ("ways we should all be the same") organization acronym like the Greek prefix meaning "the same"?

Whoa... you're blowing my mind...

But do you really pronounce something like ISO/IEC 27000:2018 as "ey-so slash eye ee cee ..."? I guess I never refer to the name of the org without a bunch of other numbers after it.

The programmers I know usually say it as a single word - which mostly occurs when pronouncing ISO 8601 (which I would say as "eyeso eight six oh one").

I don't pronounce the slash, but yeah.

I also don't refer to IEC standards that often, but that reminds me that IEEE is another odd one: I've never heard it pronounced "I-E-E-E", or in fact any way but "eye triple e".

The G in GIF is pronounced like the G in GIGANTIC.

GIGANTIC.

You bastard.

If you're talking about actual speechcraft: as in, oratory, speechifying, talking out loud to a crowd, etc, then I have one piece of advice that it seems people desperately need: stop saying "Um"! Or "Um" derivatives such as "like", "er", "you know", "really", etc. It seems like everybody I hear give a speech can't help but pepper the whole speech with them. Trump is a notable exception, but he gives so many speeches that it's expected he would get the basics right.

There is a method which can cure you of this common bad habit. It was performed on my by my venerable public speaking professor, and I can testify to it's efficacy. Get a friend, and give them a bell; one of those bells you see at reception desks, where you give it a good whack on top and it lets out a loud ring. Then start talking. It doesn't matter what, any kind of monologue will do as long as it's not memorized. Tell them to ring the bell every time you let out a filler word. That's it. After doing a few sessions of this your filler words will be gone. Just make sure the bell is loud enough to be a bit startleing.

As far as writing goes, I can only pass on the advice of the great C. S. Lewis (who, whatever anyone thinks of him, was undoubtedly as successful and extremely effective writer). Here is a cosolidated list of his writing advice, gathered from a few different sources:

  1. Always try to use language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
  2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
  3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
  4. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”
  5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite

User flair checks out.

Seriously, though, excellent quote by Lewis.

My additional advice is that if you want to be a good orator, know what that means--have an idea what you think is good, and explore why it's good, or why you think that said orator is good at it.

Christopher Hitchens was, to my way of thinking, an excellent speaker, as was James Baldwin, and in very similar ways. We no longer have anyone like Hitch, alas, though some may come close at times. This is not to say I agreed with Hitchens (or Baldwin) on all or even most of what he spoke or wrote about. But their skills were undeniable.

Hitchens

Baldwin

Each speaks with a music, and each uses various tried-and-true rhetorical devices {<--PDF warning} in speaking, and quite naturally, without, almost, seeming to think about it at all, or plan in any way what word comes next.

Writing well is another game, but related. And each (speaking, writing) is bound by the context of topic and audience. Edit: warning not warming

A small rule that I personally feel improved my editing: all adverbs and adjectives must justify their own existence. I find that they sneak into otherwise neat sentences and clog up descriptions which a reader's own imagination could fill out just fine.

I think writing is next to impossible to give good advice for improving, leaving aside very obvious tips like "get an editor or a friend with good taste to read it over; proof-read yourself; keep writing and assess how feedback changes; want to look Literary™? Use semicolons."

I can at least say that effort and persistence pays off. When I look at my old essays, even very popular ones, I see a hundred things I'd do differently if I were to rewrite them.

Everything else is often idiosyncratic, and advice that's good for someone might the opposite of what another person should hear.

I must say, LLMs can be useful tools, though you shouldn't take what they say as gospel truth. I often find them useful for just vibe checking drafts, though you need to heavily discount for sycophancy.

proof-read yourself;

There are small things like this. Like 'walk away and come review tomorrow' in the same way you would with an important email.

I'm typing this out because I don't really want to take this on board.

I'm lucky because 90% of the time, I'm happy with my first draft. I know people who become obsessed with continuously editing and rewriting to the point they're never happy with the outcome. Usually I just look for typos and then let it rip without worrying further.

I think my web serial is well past several hundred thousand words, and most of it was written on the fly. This wasn't to its obvious detriment, and I'm pleased with its reviews.

The best book I've found for brevity/pithiness in non-fiction writing is William Zinsser's On Writing Well, if that's of any help.

As a sometime professional speechwriter I have no idea how to answer this. One recommendation though is that your page should look more like poetry than prose. Another is that you should write to a clear structure, and include logical connective tissue in your first draft, but then tear down the scaffolding once the thing is built. All the 'howevers' and 'because of thats' just take too long to say.

you should write to a clear structure, and include logical connective tissue in your first draft, but then tear down the scaffolding once the thing is built.

This is how you should edit yourself? (no trap)

My opinion, yeah, but particularly in speeches. (And just in case: if you think I edit my posts on The Motte for brevity or any other reason, I do not!)

Thanks. I'm slack as shit in my words on here, but I kind of think I'd like to be better at it, hence the post.

One of my issues is that its difficult to walk away from your words before you come back to edit them and post.

Is it reflexive that once you've written something, you will go and remove words?

In our “infinite things to read” age, everyone should start by mentioning unusual conclusions or interesting bits of information at the start of a post. If the conclusion isn’t deemed unusual or if interesting bits aren’t considered interesting enough, then it’s easy to opt out of reading. Even reading three paragraphs needlessly in a day winds up saving you a whole book of reading a year. It adds up.

I disagree. Any technique which Tiktok uses will only accelerate our collective brainrot. These techniques actually work, but I don't think that's a good enough argument to use them.

What is the advantage of this over reading effortposts starting with the concluding paragraph?

People don’t always adhere to the high school essay format, and the conclusion may not include every interesting piece of information in the post or every interesting takeaway

I fail to see how "please put the conclusion at the start" is any easier than "please put a conclusion at the end" in this regard.

If people are going to adhere to a format they can adhere to either.

If people are not going to adhere to a format they are unlikely to adhere to either.

tl;dr: putting the unique info up front gives the reader the most important bit first, then lets them decide if they want to wade into the details.

See also: abstracts in scientific papers. I could expand farther on my point with examples, but I frontloaded so much of the main idea there's not much meaningful stuff left to say.

Also, putting the tldr at the bottom of a post is bad netiquette used by people that don't grasp the literal attitude of too long; didn't read.

Let me rephrase:

I see three valid approaches:

  1. Structure things with the conclusion at the start, and have the convention be to skip over the conclusion if reading the full thing, then read the rest, then read the conclusion.
  2. Structure things with the conclusion at the start, and have the convention be to read the conclusion then read the rest.
  3. Structure things with the conclusion at the end, and have people who may wish to skip read the last paragraph first to decide if they should read the rest.

Also, putting the tldr at the bottom of a post is bad netiquette

Putting the tldr at the bottom matches perfectly with a convention that people who are unsure should read the end first to check.

I'm ambivalent about the idea. I absolutely hate wannabe writers taking out their frustrations on news articles, and enjoy it when someone arranges the info in the exact manner you describe*, and yet somehow it feel blasphemous to the written word, and when I write I gravitate to "gather 'round, I'ma tell you a story" style myself.

*) Funnily enough the only newspaper I'm aware of that's doing this is the Daily Mail.

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