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March 2012 2012年3月18日 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. 我不太擅长演讲。我说话经常“嗯”、“哦”，不够连贯。有时脑子反应不过来了，还会卡壳儿。我希望我能成为更好的演讲者。但如果在更好的演讲者和更好的作家之间选一样，我会选后者。说到底，我只是希望自己有思想，这更接近于“成为好作家”，而不是“成为好的演讲者”。 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. 要想写得好，有思想至关重要。如果你知道自己在说什么，即便是用最朴实的语言来表述，人们也会觉得你很有范儿。但演讲则相反：“有思想”跟“成为一名优秀的演讲者”，几乎完全是两码事。 I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was another speaker who was much better than me. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. 我最早是在几年前的一次会议上注意到这一点的。当时有个人的发言比我的精彩多了。他把开会的人逗得狂笑不止。相形之下，我显得优柔寡断、笨嘴拙舌。后来，我按照惯例把我的发言贴到了网上。贴的时候，我努力去回想那家伙的发言，这才意识到他的发言根本没什么内容。 Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about speaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered in speaking than writing. [1] 也许对于那些擅长演讲的人来说，这是很自然的事情，但对我来说，就如同发现了新大陆一般：原来思想对演讲而言，远没有它对写作那么重要。[1] A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I decided I'd pay close attention to what he said, to learn how he did it. After about ten sentences I found myself thinking "I don't want to be a good speaker." 几年以后，我听了一次演讲，演讲人不光比我讲得好，还很有名气。哇塞，他讲得太好了。于是乎我决定仔细听听他所讲的内容，看看他到底为什么这么棒。听了大概十句后，我不由对自己说：“我不想成为一个好的演讲者。” 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, when I give a talk I usually write it out beforehand. I know that's a mistake; I know delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. The way to get the attention of an audience is to give them your full attention, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk your attention is always divided between the audience and the talk—even if you've memorized it. If you want to engage an audience it's better to start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. But if you do that you could spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it. [2] Occasionally the stimulation of talking to a live audience makes you think of new things, but in general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writing does, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you want. 成为好的演讲者不仅跟有没有思想没关系，很多时候甚至会阻碍你的思想。举例来说，在发言之前，我通常会先把发言内容写出来。我明白这样做不好；我明白事先拟好发言内容，会让发言者更难调动观众情绪。要想博得观众的注意，就要把“你的”全部注意力放在他们身上，而如果发言内容是事先拟好的，你的注意力就会一直在观众和发言内容之间摇摆——即便发言内容你已经烂熟于心。如果你想调动观众的情绪，最好的方法就是：根据要讲的内容准备一份提纲，具体的措辞可以到时候即兴发挥。不过，如果这样做，演讲时你就没时间对每句话都进行推敲了。[2]当众演讲偶尔可以激发出新东西，不过，总的说来，在带来新想法这点上，当众演讲没办法跟写作相比，因为写作的时候，你可以不厌其烦地对每个句子都进行推敲。 If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get asymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. Actors do. But here again there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. Actors don't face that temptation except in the rare cases where they've written the script, but any speaker does. Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't had any time at all to practice the new bits. [3] 如果对事先拟好的发言稿进行充分的排练，在调动观众情绪方面，就能做到接近于即兴演讲的效果。演员就这么干。但这里免不了要对“流畅度”和“创意”作出取舍。在按讲稿进行排练的整个过程中，你其实可以不断改善你的演讲内容。演员不会为此纠结的，除非脚本是他们自己写的——但这只是极少数的情况。但所有演讲者都会遇到这种纠结。我在演讲之前，通常会拿着一份打印出来的演讲稿，坐在某个角落，努力在脑子里进行排练。但是最后，我的大部分时间都用来改写演讲内容了。每一次做演讲，我的讲稿最终都会改得面目全非。结果自然是语气更不连贯，夹杂更多的“嗯”、“哦”了，因为我根本没时间去排练那些零零碎碎的新内容。[3] 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. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. [4] 而如果考虑到观众，你会遭遇比上面更为艰难的取舍。观众喜欢听好话；喜欢听笑话；喜欢陶醉在滔滔不绝的演讲里。如果你低估了观众的理解力，那么你讲得越好，就越像是在扯淡。当然，写作的时候也是一样，只是在演讲的时候，这种“堕落”更为严重。任何人在听演讲的时候，都会比阅读的时候更迟钝。演讲者在即兴演讲时，没时间去组织、推敲每个句子，观众也一样，没时间对听到的句子进行思考、消化。此外，在听演讲的观众里，个体往往会被周围人的反应所影响，而个体受到的这种影响，可能会（比演讲本身）更为巨大， 这就好像是：低音反而比高音更容易穿墙而过。任何受众群体都可以被看做乌合之众的雏形，而优秀的演讲者利用的就是这一点。我在会上听优秀的演讲者发言，之所以会笑到那种程度，部分原因就是大家都在笑。[4] So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas. But that's not all talks are good for. When I go to a talk, it's usually because I'm interested in the speaker. Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn't have time to meet individually with all the people who want to meet him. 那么说，演讲一无是处吗？如果你希望从中获取什么思想的话，听演讲肯定是不如看作家的作品。而且，并非所有演讲都能开启心智。通常情况下，我去听演讲是因为我对演讲者感兴趣。有的人，比如总统，没时间跟所有想见他的人见面，于是大多数人便选择去听他的演讲——这是最接近于跟他交谈的事情了。 Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It's probably what it was originally for. The emotional reactions you can elicit with a talk can be a powerful force. I wish I could say that force was more often used for good than ill, but I'm not sure. 演讲还有激励我做事的作用。很多著名演说家都被描述成能够激励人心的演说家，也许这并非偶然。也许公开演讲的真正目的便在于此。也许演讲便是因为这个才出现的。听演讲时所产生的情绪反应，能成为一种非常强大的力量。我希望这种力量带来的善举多过于恶行，但我也不清楚是否真的如此。 Notes 【注】 [1] I'm not talking here about academic talks, which are a different type of thing. While the audience at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they will (or at least should) make a conscious effort to see what new ideas you're presenting. [1] 这里所说的演讲不包含学术演讲，因为后者情况完全不同。虽然听学术演讲的人也喜欢听笑话，但他们会（或者说“应该”）自觉地去体会你所讲述的新思想。 [2] That's the lower bound. In practice you can often do better, because talks are usually about things you've written or talked about before, and when you ad lib you end up reproducing some of those sentences. Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. Which feels a bit dishonest, incidentally, because you have to deliver these sentences as if you'd just thought of them. [2] 这是最糟的情况。实际上，很多时候你可以做得更好，因为演讲内容通常是你以前写过或者谈过的，即兴发挥的时候，你只是在重述其中的某些句子。中世纪早期人们喜欢将旧的材料用在建筑上，即兴演讲跟这个类似。但话又说回来了，这听起来有点儿不诚实，因为在说这些句子的时候，你必须表现出是刚想到这些句子。 [3] Robert Morris points out that there is a way in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud can expose awkward parts. I agree and in fact I read most things I write out loud at least once for that reason. [3] 罗伯特·莫里斯（Robert Morris）指出，有一种排练方法可以完善你的演讲：大声朗读你的讲稿，这样能把稿子中不合适的部分暴露出来。我赞同这种做法，为此，至少有过那么一次，我曾朗读了讲稿的大部分。 [4] For sufficiently small audiences, it may not be true that being part of an audience makes people dumber. The real decline seems to set in when the audience gets too big for the talk to feel like a conversation—maybe around 10 people. [4] 如果观众数量很少，观众身份也许不会让个体变得迟钝。真正的“堕落”貌似会在观众数量足够大的时候出现（大概10个人的样子），这种情况下很难把演讲视同对话。 Thanks to Sam Altman and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. 感谢山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）和罗伯特·莫里斯审阅此文草稿。 版权声明： 本译文仅用于学习和交流目的。非商业转载请注明译者、出处，并保留文章在译言的完整链接。 |
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