Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), usually to overflow crowds, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.
Start
- Do not start a talk with a joke.
- Promise – Tell them what they gonna learn at the end of your talk.
- Cycle – make your idea repeated many times in order to be completely clear for everyone.
- Make a “Fence” around your idea so that it can be distinguished from someone else’s idea.
- Verbal punctuation – sum up information within your talk some times to make listeners get back on.
- Ask a question – intriguing one
Place and Time
- Best time for having a lecture is 11 am. (not too early and not after lunch)
- The place should be well lit.
- The place should be seen and checked before the lecture.
- The place should not be full less than a half, it must be chosen according to the amount of listeners.
Tools
For Teaching
- Board – it’s got graphics, speed, target. Watch your hands! Don’t hold them behind your back, it’s better to keep them straight and use for pointing at the board.
- Props – use them in order to make your ideas visual. Visual perception is the most effective way to interact with listeners.
For Job Talk / Exposing / Slides
- Don’t put too many words on a slide. Slides should just reflect what you’re saying, not the other way around. Pictures attracts attention and people start to wait for your explanation – use that tip.
- Make slide as easy as you can – no title, no distracting pictures, frames, points and so on.
- Do not use laser pointer – due to that you lose eye contact with the audience. Instead you can make the arrows just upon a slide.
Informing
Show to your listeners your stuff is cool and interesting.
You have to be able to
- Show your vision of that problem
- Show that you’ve done particular things (by steps)
All of that should be done real quick in no more than 5 minutes.
Persuade your listeners you’re not a rookie
Getting Famous
If you want people to remember your ideas you’ve got to have the 5 S
- Symbol associated with your ideas
- Slogan describing your idea
- Surprise
- Salient idea – the one that sticks out
- Story – how you did it
How to End
- Dont put collaborators at the end, do that at the beginning
- You shall end with a ‘Contribution’ slide – to sum up everything you’ve uniquely contributed to the result.
- At the very end you could tell a joke since people then will leave the event feeling fun and thus keep a good memory of your talk.
- Don’t end with “Thank you!”. End with
- A quote
- A salute: On how much you valued the time of them being here