Asserting vs. Reading: Or, Why Academic Presentations Suck
I teach a conference-speaking class every year. I attend a number of academic conferences every year. I often listen to or watch recordings of lectures. In this way I see and hear many dozens of speeches every year. Leaving aside the contents of the speeches, from a performance perspective a lot of them are pretty dull. Only a few ever stand out as especially engaging. What’s the difference?
There are plenty of books and videos about public speaking; there’s a lot of good advice out there. But I want to take a step back. I want to look at public speaking more from a psychological and behavioral perspective.
There’s a brief note in the psychologist B. F. Skinner’s Notebooks that gave me some insight into public speaking. Skinner discusses how the philosopher Gilbert Ryle “read” a lecture. Skinner writes that when Ryle originally wrote his lecture, “he presumably asserted it, but in reading it he was simply reading, and his textual behavior swamped any assertion” (p. 212).
In other words, Ryle’s behavior in reading or reciting the lecture was not controlled by the same variables that controlled his behavior in writing the lecture. When he wrote the lecture he was saying something about something to an imagined audience. But when he actually gave the lecture, he simply read what was already there rather than saying something about something to the audience. The work of speaking had already been done, and Ryle’s lecture was in effect a dull echo of the real speech act, which had occurred in the past.
Indeed, I find it helpful to understand reading a speech as a kind of behavior that Skinner calls echoic, although technically Skinner considers reading a text intraverbal behavior. Echoic verbal behavior is verbal behavior showing point-to-point correspondence with prior verbal behavior (in other words, imitation). Technically, reading a speech is not echoic because the stimulus is writing while the response is speaking. But the fact that written words do not readily encode the energy or intonation of speaking seems to find its “echo” in the dullness of a read lecture. In reading a speech, we often merely “echo” the words, forgetting to put back into them the nonverbal elements (intonation, manual gesture, etc.) that are a part of actual speaking. The reading “swamps” the assertion.
In his note, Skinner contrasts Ryle’s method of reading a lecture with the method of the tour guides he heard on a trip to Greece. While the tour guides occasionally consulted notes, these notes seemed to serve as cues to speech, rather than as texts to be recited. Of course, this use of notes as cues to speech is one model people use in public speaking. But it’s not always workable in academic speaking. In academic speaking we’re often discussing relatively complex subject matters, and the specific words we use can be very important. The academic conference model, at least in the humanities, is to “give a paper” rather than to just speak. Some conferences even request that you circulate your “speech” (your paper) beforehand — i.e., before you speak it. In these situations your speech act doubly precedes your actual speaking. Not only have you already said what you plan to say, but some part of your audience may have already heard what you plan to say.
There are many techniques to make your paper reading more engaging. A lot of this — about voice quality, body language, etc. — is useful. But I wonder if the most important thing is the perspective you bring to it. Think about it this way: When you’re writing a speech, you’re often trying to assert something about something — to yourself and to your imagined audience. When you read a speech, you may find yourself merely reproducing (echoing) the words on the page with your voice. You find yourself trying to speak the words you wrote correctly, instead of saying something about something to someone. Especially when we’re a bit nervous we’re likely to rely exclusively on the words on the page or the slide as a stimulus, rather than on our interest in the subject matter and audience. The speech then feels and sounds monotonous. The reading swamps the assertion.
In order to recapture the quality of assertion, we speakers need to imaginatively recreate — relive — the situation that inspired us to write the speech/lecture/paper in the first place. More technically, we need to imaginatively recreate the sources of stimulation that controlled our original textual behavior. We need to recreate the past moment — the situation which controlled the writing of the speech — in the present moment.
From this perspective, public speaking is essentially acting. And it’s no accident that, when Skinner discusses this topic in his book Verbal Behavior, he quotes a heroine in a novel swooning over an actor with the words, “I could scarcely believe he had studied a written part, for every word seemed to be uttered from the impulse of the moment” (p. 79).
Academics can’t necessarily avoid reading their presentations. But I like the idea that to give a speech is to seem to utter it “from the impulse of the moment” — to seem to assert rather than to read.