Write AND Speak
I just now finished reading Paul Graham's essay, "Writing and Speaking". It seemed I had read it before, and it's quite possible that I did, but it also may have been familiar because it's partly made of spolia, including a lot of ideas that Graham had developed in "Persuade XOR Discover".
His basic premise is that effort invested in making a message more moving, is effort diverted from crafting a message of real merit. As a commentary on the current state of rhetoric (written and spoken), I think it's mostly a correct analysis, but it shuts down an important possibility: maybe there are ways of improving one's ideas that, concomitantly, make those ideas easier to present.
This is, in many ways, like making food both more palatable and more nutritious: within the heavily-optimized and rootless system that we tend to find ourselves in, persistent tradeoffs make these contradictory goals. But traditionally, better food has been better, and worse food, worse: aesthetics and wholesomeness have risen and fallen together, more or less, since the time our senses of taste and smell first evolved. There's a movement, noticeable in the East Bay among other places, to conceptually escape from the industrial food system so that food is healthier and more enjoyable, as a whole.
Similarly, there's a very old tradition of training in rhetoric, in which people can work to improve arguments holistically. I haven't trained in it, but my understanding is that its goal is to make arguments that are logical, unified, and clear. There's one technique from this tradition that I hope can help me. I'll have to digress a little to explain why I need help.
You see, I need to write and speak, in order to take the next step in my career: I'm working on a dissertation, which I will have to defend orally. In many ways, this oral presentation is a vestigial relic of medieval training in rhetoric: if I can pass this test, they will let me put on robes and a hood styled after a Dark Ages priest's uniform, and people can start calling me "Doctor" in a sense of the word older than current notions of medicine. If this were a logic gate, it would perform the AND operation with inputs for writing and speaking. But we have trivialized rhetoric, and while the system may still test everyone on the trivium, it doesn't usually educate us in it.
Even though times have changed, two aspects of my struggle reveal some of the logic behind this test. I am having trouble getting the big picture of the overgrown document I'm editing. At the same time, my presentation of this content is somewhat halting and scattered. If more of this content were available within my mind, I'd be more fluent in my handling of it, both for purposes of editing and for purposes of presenting. It would be counterproductive to commit a huge text to rote memory while I'm still editing it, of course, but that's not what a medieval scholar would have done, anyhow.
I'm working to implement an old mnemonic device, variously called the method of loci, the journey method, and the palace of memory. This method uses emotionally-engaging images to represent concepts, and harnesses our highly-developed sense of place and movement to represent relationships among the concepts. For example, an early concept from my presentation is represented by Enoch Root in WWI fatigues, struggling to get a signal from a foxhole radio. I imagine him doing this right on my front stoop, blocking my entry. His struggle represents the tension that will drive my presentation, between the way things might be, and the way they currently are: Enoch has a portable electronics problem, that is of the same shape as a problem in photonics that my work addresses. And his location, on my front stoop, represents that concept's "place" in or near the introduction of the presentation.
Memorizing a speech using this method allows for more fluent editing, in contrast to rote memorization or even working from an external text. If I decide to introduce this topic differently, I only need to find a different image to represent that concept, and imagine such a thing sitting on my stoop where Enoch had been. If I want to present some content ahead of what Enoch represents, I can place more objects on the stairs leading up to the stoop; the patio in front of it; the gate; the sidewalk; on out as far as I'm familiar with my neighborhood. I can move Enoch's concept to a later in the presentation by placing him between other images, and if I want to make a slightly different copy of him, so as to re-visit a different aspect of the concept, maybe I'll imagine him with different props or costume. None of this will cause me to hem or haw, so long as the concepts I'm working with are familiar.
Imagining icons to represent my defense presentation will be an investment in chunking the concepts covered by my dissertation. This won't give me a synoptic view of my dissertation, unfortunately, and if I'm not careful, the images will relate only superficially. However, the sequential connections between these concepts will help me to write fluently in the same way they will help me to speak fluently. Moreover, because the images are chosen for emotional content, they will help me to engage my audience, and also help me to break through any writers' block. And if I am strategic in my choice of images, the associations I build among concepts and images can help to make my thinking more organized and robust on a deeper level.
I can no longer change how I carried out my experiments, and I never had direct control over their results, but I'm now in a position to make the interpretation and analysis of my data more true, direct, and transparent. This will make for better thinking, and a better presentation, with much the same benefit that classical and medieval students of rhetoric gained by focusing on logic.
Mr. Graham's essay provoked some good thought in me, but mostly by offering ideas to push off against. I think Americans will be healthier if we adopt ways of making food better that aren't limited to either perceptions or consequences. And similarly, I think some diseases of American culture and politics might be effectively addressed by adopting techniques of improving our thinking as a whole. If an ability to inspire action comes at the cost of thinking with rigor and flexibility, the best ideas will never find an audience. And if the menu we can present doesn't hold its own against the junk the market is offering, we shouldn't say the task is impossible until we've at least attempted some innovation.
I see tremendous opportunities to teach, and to innovate; to persuade, and to discover. I'm certain I can develop faculties that contribute to the whole of this effort, however contradictory its parts might seem within our current system.
Note: "Writing and Speaking" does include a footnote mentioning that academic presentations might improve along with writing, but I disagree with Mr. Graham that this is entirely due to a better audience. Maybe academic audiences are more receptive, but academic arguments are built for contested publication: convincing one's peers, who are reviewing a scientific journal, selects for a lot of the same traits in a body of work as convincing one's listeners at a conference.