Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. The talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. The talk is available on youtube.

How to Start

The best way to start a talk is with an empowerment promise, telling people what they will know by the end of the talk that they do not at the beginning of the talk.

Samples

  • Cycle around the idea, so everyone gets it
  • Build fence around it, to distinguish it from others’ ideas
  • Use verbal punctuation
  • Ask questions

Tools

Time and Place

The best time to give a talk is at 11:00 AM. The best place is well-lit, cased, and populated.

Board

The benefits of using a board are:

  • Provides graphic support
  • Helps control your speed
  • Gives a target for your hands to point at. Do not hide your hands in the back or in the pockets.

Props

Both boards and props help facilitate empathetic mirroring, meaning audiences are more likely to imagine themselves doing the physical work that you are doing.

Projections

Slides are for good for exposing ideas, rather than informing ideas. It is always correct to say that “you have too many slides, and too many words”.

Important rules in creating slides

  • Do not read
  • Be in the image
  • Keep images simple
  • Eliminate clutter

Crimes to avoid

  • Laser pointer
    • You lose contact with the audience while trying to use the pointer
    • Make the slide self-explanatory instead (use marks, numbers…)
  • An hapax legomenon: Use it at most once to show the complexity
  • Being too-heavy

Informing

  • Promise
  • Inspiration: People are inspired by others who exhibit passion about what they are doing.
  • How to teach how to think:
    • Provide stories they need to know
    • Questions they need to ask about those stories
    • Mechanisms for analyzing those stories
    • Ways to put those stories together
    • Ways to evaluate how reliable those stories are

Persuading

Job talks

  • Vision: provides the problem and approach
  • Done something: provides the steps or things needs to be done.
  • Cover the above in 5 minutes

Get famous: You get used to be famous, but you never get used to be ignored.

  • Symbol
  • Slogan
  • Surprise
  • Salient idea (that sticks out). “Near miss” is the best.
  • Story

How to Stop

Final slide

The final slide is likely to be exposed to the audience for the longest time. Use it to help them remember you!

  • (x) collaborators: put them in the front of the talk
  • (✓) Contributions

Example contributions from Professor Winston:

  • Argued uniqueness of human intelligence
  • Demonstrated culturally biased understanding, persuasive retelling, schizophrenic behavior, and self-aware machines
  • Offered steps toward a better understanding of ourselves and each other

Final words

  • Use a joke to finish
  • Salute to the audience (e.g. happy to be here to give the talk)
  • Never say thank you. It is a weak move.