Pranav

How to speak - Patrick Henry Winston

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How to Speak

MIT How to Speak, IAP 2018 Instructor: Patrick Winston View the complete course: https://ocw.mit.edu/how_to_speak Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

A person’s success in life is dependent on

  • their ability to speak

  • their ability to write

  • their quality of ideas (in the same order)

Knowledge

Practice

Talent

=

Quality

1. How to start

Start with an empowerment promise (the reason for being at the talk) (the best way to start)

2. Heuristics / 4 Samples :

  1. Cycle the subject (Cycling) → (tell once, circle again, circle back again) (need to say it three times so that everyone will get the point)
  2. Putting a fence around your idea: so that people don’t get confused with someone else’s idea
  3. The Idea of Verbal Punctuation: helping the audience get back on the bus if they have fogged out, by making sure that they understand what you are going to say next is important
  4. Ask a question :
    1. Ask a medium level questions, so that at least some members of the audience can answer
    2. Wait for a minimum of seven seconds for the answer from the crowd

3. Time & Place

  1. 11 AM: The perfect time to take a lecture.
    1. No food breaks immediately
    2. All of the people will be wide awake
  2. Well Lit Place: The lights should be to the highest luminosity (so the crowd doesn’t sleep)
  3. Cased: Proper boundaries and a speaker should be aware of the place of talk. Know all the nooks and corners, to be prepared for the worst cases
  4. Reasonably Populate: During the lecture, the room should be reasonably populated, and the crowd should be more the 50% of the room’s capacity.

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