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.

I feel like I’ve been getting a lot of questions about public speaking recently.

Someone asked me, about two weeks ago, whether I have formal training in public speaking. The answer to that question is no; honestly, I’m not sure what that even means or would entail.

Anyway, here’s my public speaking “advice”:

1. Get good at writing – being able to clearly articulate your ideas in text helps with being able to express yourself in general.
2. I have a policy of not turning down opportunities to talk in front of people unless I have to. You get good at doing it by doing it more. The more terrifying the opportunity, the better, and the more variety in the experiences, the better. Speaking in front of 3 people and speaking in front of 700 people can be very different types of scary when it matters. I’ve done both.
3. You kinda have to believe in the moment that what you are saying is actually worth listening to and that people should care. Another term for this is “confidence”. I think this is the actual hard part, but it’s also the most valuable.

Tl;dr convince yourself that your ideas are important enough that you should be convincing other people to listen. I guess there is a certain level of arrogance involved in this… lol.