These are the notes I took while watching How to Speak, which was MIT professor Patrick Henry Winston’s yearly lecture on how to give talks. (It’s an iconic lecture, and you should definitely watch it). These notes are the key points, and they’re mainly for me, but I thought I’d share them here in case someone else might benefit.

Look, I’ve watched so many terrible presentations at this point that I couldn’t put off writing this anymore, so here, have this imagined Q&A. If you feel attacked by any of these questions, I’m sorry. I’m nicer in real life, I promise. In my defence, this post was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek, and it’s not targeted at anyone in particular.

If you want straight advice (read: you don’t want to wade through the sarcasm), I have other posts about this topic, which you can read here.

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.