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A comment on Write like you talk. Parent comment

Re:Write like you talk by trobertson on Sunday October 25, 2015 @06:43PM (#10448771)
Generally speaking, people who give talks have them prepared beforehand. They practice speaking it, to make sure that it's clear and understandable. So to say that it's easy to write a transcript for a planned talk isn't really saying anything. It's already been written, and writing the transcript of the presentation is just a rewrite. Not all talks are prewritten, but almost all of the good ones are.

I'd also like to note that presentations are very dissimilar to conversations, and some interviews. Conversations are at least a two-directional flow of information (more directions with more people), whereas the bulk of presentations are a one-way flow of information.

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Re:Write like you talk by dkersten on Sunday October 25, 2015 @07:12PM (#10448850)
Even if they're not "prewritten", they have generally been prepared. For example, if I give a talk, I'll at least have made (mental or written) notes on what points I want to make and in what order.

When I'm in a natural conversation, the list of points I want to make is made up on the fly and is usually quite fluid (changes back and forth as I or the other people talk as a function of what is being said).

That is, talks, even if not already "written", are not the same as natural conversation at all.

I also find that really great impromptu speakers actually do speak more coherently in their natural conversations too. I assume because they're used to pre-editing what they're saying in their heads as they talk.

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Re:Write like you talk by kijin on Sunday October 25, 2015 @08:26PM (#10449038)
I don't consider myself a great speaker by any means, but yes, I do find myself pre-editing my sentences when I give a talk. Prewritten talks are no exception. I always need to edit them on the fly to suit the audience and the context.

If natural speech were a modern programming language, prewriting would be analogous to compiling to bytecode. Then you JIT compile it again when you speak. You rarely go directly from source code to machine language, perhaps because there's so much diversity among the "machines" (humans).

Heck, I even "transpile" my talks from time to time. The last time I gave a presentation, my paper was written in English but I had to present it in Korean! Needless to say, that wasted a lot of brain cycles.

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