I was checking out bloglines tonight and came across this interesting post over at Successful Blog and left a comment (mine is number 21). It got me thinking about how different writing is from speaking. I just edited a phenomenal book by a great professional speaker. To listen to the audio recording, it was dynamic, informative, and powerful, to read the transcript, it lost a lot of it’s power. Why?
In the written word you need way more structure and perfection than you do when speaking. I’m not saying public or motivational speaking is easy, I’d rather write than speak anyday. But you lose voice inflections, gestures, the ability to have a “false start” where you say the first few words of your sentence, stop and start over with a new one. You can’t skip around with your topics when writing. You need to finish one before moving to the next.
I used to do transcription for the SpeakerNetNews teleseminars and it would take me about 4 hours to do the transcription and another hour or hour and a half just to edit it into complete sentences and clean up grammar. The difference between the spoken and printed word is way bigger than most people realize.
So for now, I’ll continue telling speakers that, no, you can’t transcribe a speech and turn it into a book without editing it!
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