How to Speak #

An amazing youtube video given by a MIT Prof. Patrick Henry Winston. Content collected by Farhan Mughal.

How to start a talk #

1. Never start with a joke, it always falls flat.
2. Start with an empowerment statement, i.e. what will the audience achieve after the talk.
3. Humans have only one language processor, so make sure they focus on what you’re saying.

Sample Heuristics: #

1. Cycle on the topic. Repeat what are talking about to reinforce it
2. Build a fence around your ideas, so audiences don’t confuse them with the ideas from others. Tell them how your idea is different from others.
3. Use verbal punctuation to help audiences re-focus. State what you have covered so far and what is there to come.
4. Ask questions. Engage the audience with moderately difficult questions every now and then. But not very difficult ones.

The Tools #

Time & place: #

1. Choose an appropriate time for talks. 11 am is a good time for the 1st lecture of the day.
2. The place should be well lit.
3. Know the place before hand, it should be cased so that you can address challenges if any.
4. Make sure it’s reasonably populated.

Boards & Props: #

1. Chalks and boards are good for informing and teaching.
2. Boards are well paced medium, people can absorb content while you write or draw graphics.
3. Using Boards and props helps in empathetic mirroring i.e. audiences think they are doing the writing and drawing
4. You can used hands to draw attention.
5. Slides are good for exposing.
6. Don’t use laser pointers as they reduce the speakers' chance to engage with audiences, use a sign-post instead.
7. Slides should have minimum amount of words. You do the talking and explanation of the points.
8. Font size should be large enough for easy reading.
9. Props are useful to help audiences visualize things.
10. Practice your talk with people who don’t know your work so that they don’t hallucinate whats not in the presentation.

Inspire #

1. Show your passion towards the subject
2. Promise a solution to a problem
3. Inspire by igniting passion
4. Teach people how to think by:

- Providing stories that they need to know
- Providing questions that they need to ask about these stories
- Providing mechanism to analyse these stories
- Providing ways to put together stories
- Providing ways to evaluate reliability of the stories

Persuade #

1. Job Talks

Vision - tell about a problem they’d be interested in and provide your approach to the solution.

Achievement - provide the steps you will take to solve the problem

2. Getting Famous

Why? Because you want your work to be recognized. How? Brand your work, have a slogan, have a salient idea and have a story to tell.

How to End a Talk #

1. The last slide

It should enumerate what the audience has learnt or achieved after this talk, give them the time to read.

2. Final words

• Never thank the audience.
• End with a call to action.
• Alright, you can tell a joke now, people will think they’ve had fun all the while.