Learn to Perform

Today, I listened to the worst lecture of my entire life. It was a comparison of music and mathematics, given by a doctor of mathematics from UC Berkeley. This is a subject with a lot of potential. It has been discussed a great deal by a great number of people for a great long time. I struggle to believe that this person has done much of any work on the subject at all.

The entire lecture was abysmal. The content of it had a host of problems, but more importantly, his delivery was awful. When he first got up there, I was listening to hear if his voice cracked from nervousness. It didn't, but that was about the only good thing I could say. He spoke too softly. He trailed off. He spent too much time on simple points and glossed over major ones. He repeated himself over and over again. And he ran well over his allotted time, but didn't even finish his lecture because of how long he took. As an added pain, he also wrote down all of his notes in a PowerPoint presentation, which he read off of for the entirety of the speech.

At the doctoral level of academia, I would have thought that everybody would learn some cardinal rules of presentation. This was more of a lesson in How Not to Present than anything else. But it did drive home a very important point.

Writers should learn how to perform. This is a subject that I'm sure many would object to, but I stand firm in my belief. Learning how to perform will make you a better writer. The written word is based on the spoken word, so if you know how to give a speech, you will better understand how to write a speech. You will learn how phrasing works, how to group sentences, you will understand what the sounds and the weights of words are. You will far better understand transitions, how one can be smooth, and how painful a rough one is.

The standard argument against learning to perform is that writing does not require performance. While that is true, the problem is that it is not true enough. If you write something that you want to share, it may just be that the only way to share it is by you reading it out loud. If you put in a great amount of effort and power into your writing, why would you disgrace it by giving a horrible reading of it? Similarly, what if you got really popular and had to give an interview, but you sounded like you were barely even literate? I doubt you would be happy with that. Heck, what if you met a new person, mentioned that you were a writer, and the person is shocked because you sound like an ineloquent fool?

No matter what it you do, you should learn how to perform. Learn how to speak well, speak effectively, make people care about what you have to say. Because when you are speaking about something you care about, the last thing you want is everybody listening to be bored out of their skulls.