Notes on How To Speak
professional-growth
notes
My notes for Patrick Winston’s course on how to speak.
- Overview
- Introduction
- How To Start
- Four Sample Heuristics
- Build Up Your Personal Repertoire and Style
- Special Cases
- How to Stop
Overview
Here are some notes I took while watching Patrick Winston’s course on how to speak.
Introduction
- The Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies court martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon
- Students should not go out into life without the ability to communicate.
- Your success in life will largely be determined by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas
- Your ability to speak is the most important
- Quality of communication is a function of your knowledge, how much you practice with that knowledge, and your inherent talent
- Knowledge is the most important factor
- Inherent talent is the least important factor
- You can get a lot better than people who have inherent talents when you have the right amount of knowledge
How To Start
- Do not start with a joke
- People are not ready for a joke at the beginning
- Start with empowerment promise
- The reason for being here
- Example: Tell people what they are going to know by the end of the conversation that they did not know at the start
Four Sample Heuristics
- Cycle on the subject
- Go around it again and again
- Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them again, and again (3 times total)
- Helps increase the probability that your audience will absorb what you are trying to communicate
- Build a fence around your idea so that it is not confused with someone else’s idea
- Explain how your idea is different
- Verbal Punctuation
- Provide landmarks where you announce to people who lose focus that it is a good time to start paying attention again
- Enumerate through what you have covered
- Provide numbers
- Give a sense that there is a seam in the talk and they can get back on
- Ask a Question
- You can wait for about seven seconds for an answer
- The question has to be carefully chosen
- Can’t be too obvious
- Can’t be too hard
Build Up Your Personal Repertoire and Style
The Tools
- Time and Place
- Best time to have a lecture is often 11AM
- Most people are awake and have not gone back to sleep
- It’s not right after a meal
- People are not fatigued
- The place needs to be well lit
- Low light tends to signal that it is time to go to sleep
- The place should be “cased”
- Go there before the talk and see what it is like
- Make sure there are no surprises
- Imagine the seats are filled with disinterested farm animals
- The place should be reasonably populated
- Get a an appropriately sized place for the expected audience size
- More than half full
- Best time to have a lecture is often 11AM
- Boards, Props, and Slides
- Chalk is a good tool when your purpose is informing
- You can exploit the fact that you can use graphics in your presentation
- Speed with which you write on the board is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas
- Gives you something that you can do with your hands as either something to write on or point at.
- Slides are good when your purpose is exposition
- Example: job talks and conference talks
- Use fewer slides and fewer words
- Don’t read the words on your slides
- Be in view when the audience is looking at the slides
- Don’t force your audience to constantly shift their view from the slide to the speaker
- Slides should be condiments to what you are saying
- Keep images simple
- Eliminate Clutter
- remove logos
- remove titles: tell them the title
- remove the bullet points from lists
- Reducing what what is on the slide allows the audience to pay more attention to what you say
- Use a sample slide to determine the minimum font size that is easily ledgible
- Probably font size of 40 - 50
- Don’t use laser pointers or pointing sticks
- When you are using these, you are not making eye contact with the audience
- Use onscreen arrows to point to things on a slide
- Print your presentation out and lay it out on a table
- Makes it easy to see if there is too much in it
- When you need to have text, give your audience time to read it
- You can have at most one visually complex slide in a presentation
- Example: to make a point of how incomprehensibly complex something is
- Props
- give the audience an idea of where the talk is going
- helps to view a problem in a different way
- helps emphasize a point
- helps make the talk memorable
- Chalk and props can help with empathetic mirroring
- Your might feel like they are writing on the chalkboard
- Can’t do that with slides
- Chalk is a good tool when your purpose is informing
Special Cases
- Informing
- Start with a promise
- Express how cool the topic is
- Inspiration
- Tell beginners they can do it
- Help the experienced see a problem in a new way
- Exhibit passion about what you are doing
- Teaching people how to think
- Provide audiences with the stories they need to know
- Provide audiences with the questions they need to ask about those stories
- Provide mechanisms for analyzing those stories
- Provide ways of putting stories together
- Provide ways of evaluating how reliable a story is
- Start with a promise
- Persuading
- Oral Exams
- The most common reason for people failing an oral exam is a failure to situate and a failure to practice
- situate
- It is important to talk about your research in context
- Example: This is a problem that is being pursued all over the world
- Example: There has not been any progress on this before me in the past 30 years
- Everyone is looking for a solution because it will have impact on so many other things
- It is important to talk about your research in context
- practice
- practice does not mean sharing your slides with people you share an office with
- If people know what you are doing, they will hallucinate that there is explanatory material in your presentation that is not there
- a faculty supervisor is not a good person to help you debug a talk
- you need to practice presenting with friends who do no know what you are doing
- Start your practice session by saying if they can’t make you cry, you won’t value them as a friend anymore
- It is better to have an examining committee that is much older
- practice does not mean sharing your slides with people you share an office with
- Job Talks
- Show them that you have some kind of vision
- a vision is in part a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your approach
- Show them that you have done something
- List the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the solution to a problem (preferably the problem is the one expressed in the vision)
- Enumerate your contributions
- You have five minutes to express your vision and tell them what you have done
- Show them that you have some kind of vision
- Getting Famous (How to ensure your work is recognized)
- Why would you want to be famous?
- You get used to being famous, you never get used to being ignored
- Your ideas are like your children. You don’t want them to go into the world in rags
- How to get remembered
- Have a symbol associated with your work
- Have a (simple) slogan that provides a handle on the work
- Have a surprising attribute in your work
- Have a salient idea (an idea that sticks out)
- Have a story that tells how you did it, how it works, and why it’s important
- Why would you want to be famous?
- Oral Exams
How to Stop
- What is the final slide?
- Recognize collaborators on the first slide, not the last
- Do not end with a slide saying “Questions?”
- This is a wast of real estate as the last slide can be up there for 20 minutes
- Do not end with a URL address
- Do not end with a slide saying “THE END” or “Thank You”
- The last slide is an opportunity to leave people with who you are
- The last slide should end with your contributions
- What you talked about
- What you demonstrated
- What the audience got out of it
- What are the final words?
- Can finish with a joke
- The audience is ready for it by then
- Don’t end with “Thank You”
- It’s a weak move
- Could say “It’s been great to be here and look forward to coming back”
- Can finish with a joke
References:
- MIT OpenCourseWare Video: How To Speak by Patrick Winston