How to Speak by Patrick Winston

Are you giving a speech or a talk soon?  
Dr. Patrick Winston has a wonderful lecture on "How to Speak."  It's an hour long and worth your time.
I added my notes below for reference.  Enjoy!

HOW TO SPEAK BY PROF WINSTON#How to start a talk? -Don't start with a joke, start with a promise
#Some techniques

• Cycle on the topic to reinforce it (3x)
• Build a fence around our ideas, so audiences don't confuse them with the ideas from others
• Use verbal punctuation to help audiences re-focus
• Ask questions to audiences

#Time & place

• 11am is a good time for the 1st lecture of the day
• The place should have good lighting condition, should be cased and reasonably populated

#Tools: boards, props and slides

• Chalks and boards are good for informing and teaching, slides are good for exposing
• Chalks and boards are good for showing graphics. You can control the speed of talk to help audiences absorb contents, and use your hand to point a target on board
• Empathetic Mirroring is the technique using props to help audiences think about abstract things using i.e. audiences can feel they are doing the writing and demonstration (blackboard, chalk)
• Bad slides contain too many pages and too many words
• Audiences can be tired to switch between slides and speaker if they far away from each other
• How to create good slides: simplification. Audiences will pay less attention to the speaker if their slides contain too many words
• Font size shouldn't be large enough for easy reading
• Lazer pointer reduces the speakers' chance to engage (e.g. eye contact) with audiences, using sign-post in the slides instead
• We humans only have one language processor (visual, reading, listening). Focus is key.

#Informing and Inspiring

• Show your passion for the topic
• An example of making a promise and showing passion
• How to teach people how to think, provide them with:
  • The stories that they need to know
  • The questions that they need to ask about these stories
  • The mechanism to analyse these stories
  • The ways to put together stories
  • The ways to evaluate reliable stories

#Oral exams, Job Talks

• People usually fail them because they fail to situate the context and fail to practice
• Practice your talk with people who don't know you work

#Getting famous

• Why should you care about getting famous because we want our work to be recognised and we need good communication skills to do that
• How to get your presentation ideas to be remembered, we need to have: symbol, slogan, surprise, salient (ideas) and (tell a) story

#How to end a talk

• Some examples on final slides, show what you have done (i.e. contributions) and give audiences the time to read them!

#Final words

• A joke, his colleagues always end a talk with a joke, so people think they have had fun all the time :)
• The phrase "thank you" is a weak move, "thank you for listening" is even worse, it suggests that people listen to your talk because their politeness
• Some great endings without saying "thank you"
• Salute the audiences