Notes on Prof Patrick Wilson’s talk on “How to Speak”
Ability to communicate
“We are storytelling animals”
Students shouldn’t go out without the ability to communicate for success in life depends on
- ability to speak
- ability to write
- quality of ideas
in that order
Quality of communication depends on
- Knowledge in this area
- practising what you know
- inherent talent
in that order: what matters most is what you know!
Rule on engagement
“Could you close that laptop please?” - humans have only one language processer.
Armament
How to start?
- Start with a Joke? I don’t recommend it!
- People are adjusting in, and are not ready for a joke.
- Start with an “empowerment promise”
- “At the end of this 60 minutes…….”
- Express how stuff you’re going to talk about is cool!
- How do you inspire people?
- Everyone was inspired when they exhibited passion about what they are doing!
4 Samples of Heuristics
- Cycle around about the course of the talk
- 20% of the listeners may be fogged out at a given time. So repeating it in a cycle, 3 times can convey it to most of the audience
- Build a Fence around your idea, so that people don’t assume it to be something else
- Verbal Punctuation- to bring people back into the bus
- To bring prople who fogged out back into the loop, give an overview now an then (a status update of sorts)
- Ask a Question
- Wait for 7 seconds for an answer
- question shouldn’t be too obvious - people will be embarrassed to answer
- question shouldn’t be too hard - nobody will have anything to say
Build up your personal repertoire by observing your favourite speakers
Time and Place
- Time: do not coincide with food or sleep
- Place:
- Well lit
-‘It’s extremely difficult to see slides through closed eyelids’
- the place should be cased
- like you’re going to rob a bank
- the hall should be reasonably populated
- Right sized place that looks more than half full
Boards and Chalk
- Blackboards and Chalk is the tool for informing/teaching/lecturing; slides are for exposing
- Writing has a graphic quality
- speed with which you write on the board is approx. how fast people can grasp
- the board acts as a targer
- Hands in the pocket or back?
- Big NO
- Extraordinarily insulting in many cultures
- “looks like you are concealing a weapon”
- with the board, you have something to do with your hands, something to point at
Slides
- They shouldn’t take attention away from the speaker
- Fewer words- when there’s too mush to read, “I wish you hadn’t talked much, it was very distracting”
- De-clutter:
- Get rid of the logos
- Get rid of the titles
- Get rid of the bullets and dots
- Laser pointers or any pointers for that matter take away attention and eye contact with the audience
- “You know what, we could all leave and he still wouldn’t know”
- Use arrows or marks in the slides instead of using a pointer
- Speaker should be close to the slides
Props
- Talks are like plays!
- Use objects- remember Walter Lewin!
- The reason this is effective is “EMPATHETIC MIRRORING”
- Create events to make the talk memorable
- break a prop
- burn something
Preparing & Reviewing
- Preparing for Oral Exams
- Get friends who nothing about the topic to review
- “If you can’t make me cry, I won’t value as a friend anymore!”
- People who know what you’re talking about, like your faculty advisor hallucinated that there is stuff in the talk that actually isn’t
Job Talks
- Showcase a vision
- problem that people care about
- your novel approach
- Showcase that you’ve done stuff
- Listing the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve a solution to the above problem
- You don’t need to have done everything already
- “Here’s what needs to be done.”
- Enumerate your contributions
- All in 5 minutes
Getting Famous/ the recognition you deserve
- “Your ideas are like your children, you don’t want them to go into the world in rags”
- Let them get recognised fot their value
- to get remembered,
- make sure you have a SYMBOL associated with your presentation
- a SLOGAN
- a SURPRISE
- a SALIENT IDEA
- an idea that sticks out, not necessarily the most important
- the STORY of how you did it
How to Stop
- FInal Slide: not to have
- Collaborators: Put that slide towards the beginning of the talk
- Questions: waste of real estate and opportunity to show who you are
- website: waste of opportunity, does nothing for you
- “THE END” :lol:
- Thank You: Did the people stay out of politeness?
- Final Slide: to have
- Conclusions
- Contributions
- Tell a joke! People are ready and receptive for a joke!
- That way people think they had fun the whole time
- Salute the audience:
- Speak good about the audience.
- Tell what you want them to do, etc.