Get speechwriting help by talking to a rubber duck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The November 2025 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Ben Guttmann on page 6 about speechwriting titled Talk It Out and subtitled How explaining a problem to a rubber duck leads to solutions. He has a quotation from a paragraph on page 95 of the 1999 book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

“A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. The other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck bobbing up and down in a bathtub). They do not need to say a word; the simple act of explaining, step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself.”

 The following paragraph (not included in Ben’s magazine article) adds further:

 “It sounds simple, but in explaining the problem to another person you must explicitly state things that you may take for granted when going through the code yourself. By having to verbalize some of these assumptions, you may suddenly gain new insight into the problem.”

 There also is a Wikipedia article titled Rubber duck debugging. And there is an article by Scott Hanselman on December 10, 2020 titled The Art of Rubber Ducking or Rubber Duck Debugging which describes how:

 “You'll find that getting the problem outside your head, via your mouth, and then back into your ears is often enough to shake brain cells loose and help you solve the issue.

 Rubber Ducking also is great practice in technical communication! Have you ever given a technical talk? There's actually not much distance between explaining a technical issue clearly, correctly, and concisely and giving a talk at a user group or conference!”

 Another article by Max Florschutz at UNUSUAL THINGS on June 14, 2021 is titled Being a Better Writer: The Rubber Duck. Still another article by Charlie Rapple at The SCHOLARLY kitchen for April 24, 2025 is titled Rubber Ducking for Research Communication: Why Explaining to Nobody Helps You Explain to Anybody.