How to Speak by Patrick Winston
MIT Professor Patrick Winston (who died in July 2019) gave this lecture as part of MIT’s How to Speak course. It is about an hour long and covers pretty much everything you need to know about giving a presentation.
How to Speak by Patrick Winston on MIT OpenCourseWare (63 min)
Winston opens with a claim that sounds extreme but has the ring of truth: your success in life is determined by your ability to speak first, your ability to write second, and the quality of your ideas third. In that order. He is not saying ideas do not matter. He is saying a good idea poorly communicated goes nowhere, while a decent idea communicated well can change things.
His formula: Knowledge + Practice + Talent, where Talent is the smallest term. He tells a story about skiing better than Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, despite her being a world-class athlete, because he knew the mountain and had practiced more than she had. The point is obvious once you hear it: speaking is a skill, not a gift.
How to Start
Do not open with a joke. This is the most common bad advice in public speaking. Jokes set up an adversarial dynamic; the audience hopes you are funny and you hope they laugh. If the joke falls flat, you have lost them before you have said anything substantive.
Instead, open with an empowerment promise. Tell the audience what they will know or be able to do by the end of your talk. They are not there for you; they are there for what they can get from you. Make it clear what that is.
The Core Techniques
Cycling. About 20 percent of your audience is checked out at any given moment. Not because your talk is bad. That is just how attention works. The solution: say the important thing three times. First introduce it. Then elaborate. Then summarize at the end. By the third pass, even the fogged-out listeners will catch it.
Fences. Do not let your audience confuse your idea with a similar one. If you are presenting an algorithm called Jones’s algorithm that runs in linear time and the audience knows the real Jones’s algorithm runs in exponential time, say so explicitly. Build a fence around your idea. This is Jones’s. This is not.
Verbal punctuation. Give your audience landmarks. Say “The first problem is…” and “The second problem is…” This lets people who tuned out know where to re-engage.
Questioning. Ask questions that are not too obvious and not too hard. Then wait. Wait up to seven seconds. It feels uncomfortable. It works.
Job Talks vs. Lectures
Winston draws a sharp distinction between talks that expose (job talks, conference presentations) and talks that inform (classroom lectures).
For exposition talks, you have roughly five minutes to get your message across. In that window you must establish: the problem you are solving, why it matters, why your approach is new and effective, and what you have contributed. If you miss that window, the audience is gone.
For lectures, a chalkboard beats slides. Chalk allows you to pace the material, respond to the audience, and re-engage mirror neurons. When students watch you write, they simulate writing, which helps them learn. That said, slides are fine for lectures if they are well designed. More on that below.
Slide Design
Most text on a slide is worse than useless. Humans have one language processing center. If the audience is reading your slide, they cannot listen to you. They will do one or the other, and you lose either way.
Winston’s rule: cut almost all text. Use large fonts: 35 to 40 point minimum. Slides exist to support you, not to replace you.
He suggests preparing two versions: one for live presentation (minimal text) and one for handouts (with all the detail). The handout version compensates for what you removed from the live version.
No laser pointers. They force you to turn your back to the audience. Use arrows built into your slides, or a Spotlight-style pointer that highlights on your laptop screen without requiring you to face away.
Props
Physical objects create memorable moments. Winston demonstrates with a bicycle wheel (following Seymour Papert) to show how problem-solving works. Alan Lazarus once dropped a pendulum with a steel ball to demonstrate conservation of energy; standing right where the ball would hit him if the physics went wrong. Nobody forgot that demonstration.
If you work in distributed systems or cloud computing, props require creativity. But they are worth the effort.
How to End
End with a contributions slide, not a conclusions slide. Conclusions sound like theoretical findings. Contributions sound like concrete achievements.
Do not end by saying “thank you.” Winston argues this implies the audience only stayed out of politeness. His alternative: end with a benediction, like a political speaker; Chris Christie and Bill Clinton both come up in the lecture as examples of speakers who close with a strong, memorable statement rather than a weak thank you.
Winston’s Star
Winston had a framework for making ideas memorable, which he called the Star:
- Symbol: a visual representation
- Slogan: a memorable phrase
- Surprise: something counterintuitive
- Salient idea: a distinctive concept
- Story: a narrative framework
He credits his arch learning work’s fame to hitting all five. If you are presenting an idea and want people to remember it, check your Star.
The lecture is practical in the best sense. It does not tell you to find your inner something. It tells you to say your point three times, to stop using laser pointers, and to put your contributions on the last slide. Then it explains why each of those things works.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺