How to Speak

PATRICK WINSTON: The Uniform Code of Military Justice

specifies court martial for any officer who sends a soldier

into battle without a weapon.

There ought to be a similar protection for students

because students shouldn't go out

into life without the ability to communicate,

and that's because your success in life

will be determined largely by your ability to speak,

your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas,

in that order.

I know that I can be successful in this

because the quality of communication,

your speaking, your writing, is largely

determined by this formula.

It's a matter of how much knowledge you have,

how much you practice with that knowledge,

and your inherent talent, and notice

that the T is very small.

What really matters is what you know.

This point came to me suddenly a few decades ago when

I was skiing at Sun Valley.

I had heard that it was Celebrity Weekend, and one

of the celebrities was Mary Lou Retton,

famous Olympic gymnast, perfect 10s in the vault.

And I heard that she was a novice at skiing,

so when the opportune moment arrived,

I looked over on the novice slope

and saw this young woman who, when she became unbalanced,

went like that.

And I said that's got to be her.

That must be the gymnast.

But then, it occurred to me, I'm a much better skier

than she is, and she's an Olympic athlete-- not only

an ordinary Olympic athlete, an outstanding one.

And I was a better skier because I had the K, and I had the P,

and all she had was the T. So you

can get a lot better than people who

may have inherent talents if you have

the right amount of knowledge.

So that's what my objective is today, and here's my promise.

Today, you will see some examples

of what you can put in your armamentarium of speaking

techniques, and it will be the case

that some one of those examples, some heuristic, some technique,

maybe only one, will make--

will be the one that gets you the job.

And so this is a very non-linear process.

You never know when it's going to happen,

but that is my promise.

By the end of the next 60 minutes,

you'll have been exposed to a lot of ideas, some of which

you'll incorporate into your own repertoire,

and they will ensure that you get the maximum opportunity

to have your ideas valued and accepted

by the people you speak with.

Now, in order to do that, we have

to have a rule of engagement, and that

is no laptops, no cell phones.

So if you could close those, I'll

start up as soon as you're done.

Some people ask why that is a rule of engagement,

and the answer is, we humans only

have one language processor.

And if your language processor is enga--

could you shut the laptop, please?

If your language processor is engaged browsing the web

or reading your email, you're distracted.

And worse yet, you distract all of the people around you.

Studies have shown that.

And worse yet, if I see a open laptop somewhere back

there or up here, it drives me nuts, and I do a worse job.

And so that ensures that all of your friends

who are paying attention don't get the performance

that they came to have.

So that's it for preamble.

Let's get started.

First thing we talk about, of course, is how to start.

Some people think the right thing to do

is to start a talk with a joke.

I don't recommend it, and the reason

is that, in the beginning of a talk,

people are still putting their laptops away.

They're becoming adjusted to your speaking parameters,

to your vocal parameters, and they're not ready for a joke.

So it doesn't work very well.

They usually fall flat.

What you want to do instead is start with empowerment promise.

You want to tell people what they're

going to know at the end of the hour

that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour.

It's an empowerment promise.

It's the reason for being here.

What would be an example?

Oh, I see.

At the end of this 60 minutes, you will know things

about speaking you don't know now,

and something among those things you know

will make a difference in your life.

Yeah, that's an empowerment promise,

so that's the best way to start.

So now that I've talked a little bit about how to start,

what I want to do is give you some samples of heuristics

that are always on my mind when I give a talk,

and first of these heuristics is that it's a good idea to cycle

on the subject.

Go around it.

Go round it again.

Go round it again.

Some people say, tell him what you want to tell him.

Tell him again, and then tell him a third time,

as if people weren't intelligent.

But the point is--

the reason is-- well, there are many reasons, one of which

is, at any given moment, about 20% of you

will be fogged out no matter what the lecture is.

So if you want to ensure that the probability that everybody

gets it is high, you need to say it three times.

So cycling is one of the things that I always

think about when I give a talk.

Another thing I think about is, in explaining my idea,

I want to build a fence around it so that it's not confused

with somebody else's idea.

So if you were from Mars, and I was teaching you

about what an arch is, I might say to you,

well, that's an arch.

And that's not to be confused with some other things

that other people might think is--

this is not an arch.

That's not an arch.

I'm building a fence around my idea

so that it can be distinguished from somebody else's idea.

So in a more technical sense, I might say, well,

my algorithm might similar--

might seem similar to Jones's algorithm,

except his is exponential, and mine's linear.

That's putting a fence around your idea

so that people can not be confused about how it

might relate to something else.

The third thing on this list of samples

is the idea of verbal punctuation.

And the idea here is that, because people

will occasionally fog out and need to get back on the bus,

you need to provide some landmark places where

you're announcing that it's a good time to get back on.

So I might, in this talk, say something

about this being my outline.

The first thing we're going to do is talk about how to start.

Then we're going to deal with these four samples,

and among these four samples, I've

talked about the first idea-- that's cycling.

The second idea, building-- and now,

the third idea is verbal punctuation.

So I'm enumerating and providing numbers.

I'm giving you a sense that there's a seam in the talk,

and you can get back on.

So now, we're on a roll, and since we're on a roll,

can you guess what fourth idea might be here--

an idea that helps people get back on the bus?

AUDIENCE: Ask a question.

PATRICK WINSTON: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Ask a question.

[INAUDIBLE]

PATRICK WINSTON: Ask a question, yes.

Thank you.

So ask a question.

And so I will ask a question-- how much dead air can there be?

How long can I pause?

I counted seven seconds.

It seemed like an eternity to me to wait and not say anything

for seven seconds, but that's the standard amount of time

you can wait for an answer.

And of course, the question has to be carefully chosen.

It can't be too obvious because then people

will be embarrassed to say it, but the answers can't

be too hard because then nobody will have anything to say.

So here are some sample heuristics

you can put in your armamentarium

and build up your repertoire of ideas about presentation.

And now, if this persuades you that there

is something to know, that there is knowledge,

then I've already succeeded because what I want to convince

you of, is if you watch the speakers you admire and feel

are effective, and ask yourselves

why they're successful, then you can

build up your own personal repertoire

and develop your own personal style.

And that's my fundamental objective,

and the rest of this talk is about some

of the things that are in my armamentarium

that I think are effective.

So next thing on our agenda, as we

start to discuss these other things,

is a discussion of time and place.

So what do you think is a good time to have a lecture?

11 AM?

Yeah.

And the reason is most people at MIT are awake by then,

and hardly anyone has gone back to sleep.

It's not right after a meal.

People aren't fatigued from this or that.

It's a great time to have a lecture.

So that brings me, next, to the question of what

about the place?

And the most important thing about the place

is that it be well lit.

This room is well lit.

Problem with other kinds of rooms is that we humans,

whenever the lights go down, or whenever

the room is dimly lighted, it signals

that we should go to sleep.

So whenever I go somewhere to give a talk,

even today, the first thing I do when

I speak to the audio-visual people

is say, keep the lights full up.

Oh, they might reply, people will see the slides better

if we turn the lights off, and then I reply,

it's extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids.

What else can you say about the place?

Well, the place should be cased, and I

mean that in a colloquial sense, of like if you're

robbing a bank, you would go to the bank

some occasions before to see what it's like,

so there are no surprises when you do your robbery.

So whenever I go somewhere to speak,

the first thing I ask my host to do is to take me to the place

where I'll be speaking so that if there are any weirdnesses,

I'll be able to deal with it.

Sometimes, it might require some intervention.

Sometimes, it just might require me to understand

what the challenges are.

So when I came here this morning,

I did what I typically do.

I imagined that all the seats were

filled with disinterested farm animals,

and that way, I knew that, no matter how bad it was,

it wouldn't be as bad as that.

So finally, it should be reasonably--

it should be reasonably populated.

It should be the case that--

if there were 10 people in this hall,

everyone would be wondering, what's

going on that's so much more interesting that nobody's here.

So you want to get a right sized place that's--

doesn't have to be packed, but it

has to be more than half full.

So those are some thoughts about a time and place.

Next thing I want to talk about is a subject

of boards and props and slides.

Well, these are the tools of the trade.

I believe that this is the right tool for speaking

when your purpose is informing.

The slides are good when your purpose is exposing,

but this is what I use when I'm informing, teaching, lecturing,

and there's several reasons why I use it.

For one thing, when you use the board,

you have a graphic quality.

It's the case that, when you have a board, then

you can easily exploit the fact that you can use graphics

in your presentation.

So that's the graphic quality that I like, and the next thing

I like is the speed property.

The speed with which you write on the blackboard

is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas.

If you go flipping through a bunch of slides,

nobody can go that fast.

Finally, one great property of a board

is that it can be a target.

Many people who are novices at speaking

find themselves suddenly aware of their hands.

It's as if their hands were private parts that shouldn't

be exposed in public, so right away, they go into the pockets,

and this is considered insulting in some parts of the world.

Or alternatively, maybe the hands

will go in back like this.

I was once in a convent in Serbia, and my host--

as soon as we entered, a nun came up to us

and offered us a refreshment.

And I was about to say, no, thank you,

and he said, eat that stuff or die.

It's a question of local custom and politeness.

But then before anything happened there,

the nun pulled my hands out like this

because it was extraordinarily insulting in that culture

to have your hands behind your back.

So why is that?

Well, it's usually supposed that that's

that it has to do with whether you're concealing a weapon.

So if your hands are in your pockets or behind your back,

then it looks like you might have a weapon,

and that's what I mean by the virtue--

one of these virtues of the board.

Now, you have something to do with your hands.

You can point out the stuff.

I was once watching Seymour Papert give a lecture,

and I thought it was terrific.

So I went a second time--

first time to absorb the content, second time

to note style.

And what I discovered is that Papert was constantly

pointing at the board.

And then I thought about it a little while,

and I noted that none of the stuff he was pointing to

had anything to do with what he was saying.

Nevertheless, it was an effective technique.

So that's just a little bit about the virtue

of blackboards.

Now, I want to talk about props.

The custodians of knowledge about props

are the playwrights.

Many decades ago, I saw a play by Henrik Ibsen.

It was Hedda Gabler.

I remember vaguely that it was about a woman in an unhappy

marriage, and her husband was in competition for an academic job

with somebody else.

And he was going to lose partly because he was boring,

and partly because the competitor had just

written a magnificent book.

By the way, this is back in the days

before there were copying machines and computers.

Anyhow, as the play opens, there's a potbellied stove,

and in the beginning of the play,

the potbelly stove, with its open door,

just has some slightly glowing embers.

But the potbellied stove is always there,

and as tension mounts in the play,

and you see this manuscript, this

prop that Ibsen so artfully used, you just know

that something's going to happen,

because as the play goes on, the fire gets bigger and hotter

and finally all consuming, and you just

know that that manuscript is going to go into that fire.

This memorable thing is what I remember about the play.

So playwrights have got this all figured out,

but on the other hand, they're not the only people

who can use props.

Here's an example of the use of a prop, also

due to Seymour Papert.

He was talking about how it's important to look

at the problem in the right way, and here's

an example that not only teaches that, but makes it possible

for you to embarrass your friends

in mechanical engineering.

So here's what you do.

Take a bicycle wheel, and you start it spinning.

And then you put some torque on the axle,

or equivalently, you blow on the edge.

And the issue is, does it go that way,

or does it go that way?

Now, the mechanical engineers will immediately say, oh, yes,

I see-- right hand screw wheel.

And they'll put their fingers in this position,

but forget exactly how to align their fingers

with the various aspects of the problem.

And so it's usually the case that they get it right

with about a 50% probability.

So their very fancy education gets them up

to the point where they're equivalent to flipping a coin.

But it doesn't have to be that way

because you can think about the problem a little differently.

So here's what you do.

You take some duct tape, and you put it

around the part of the wheel like that.

And now, you start to think about, not the whole wheel,

but just a little piece that's underneath the duct tape.

So here, that piece comes rolling over the top,

and at this point, you blow on it with a puff of air.

Forgetting about the rest of the wheel,

what happens to that little piece that's

under the duct tape?

It must want to go that way because you

banged on it like that.

It's already going down like that.

And what about the next piece?

Same thing.

Next piece?

Same thing.

So the only thing that can happen

is that the wheel goes over like that.

And so now, you'll never wonder again

because you're thinking about the problem in the right way,

and it's demonstrated by the use of a prop.

You can try this after we're done.

Another example I like to remember

is one from when I was taking 8.01.

Alan Lazarus was the instructor at the time,

and he was talking about the conservation of energy, kinetic

and potential.

And there was a long wire in a ceiling in 26-100 attached

to a much bigger steel ball, but one--

not one like this.

And Lazarus took the ball up against the wall like this.

He put his head flat against the wall to steady himself,

and then he let go, and the pendulum

takes many seconds to go over and back,

and then gently kisses Lazarus's nose.

And so you have many seconds to think,

this guy really believes in the conservation of energy.

Do not try this at home.

The problem is that, the first time you do this,

you may not just let go.

There's a natural human tendency to push.

So that's a little bit on a subject of props.

It's interesting.

Whenever surveys are taken, students always say more chalk,

less PowerPoint.

And why would that be?

Props are also very effective.

Why would that be?

I'll give you my lunatic fringe view on this.

It has to do with what I would call empathetic mirroring.

When you're sitting up there watching me write on the board,

all those little mirror neurons in your head, I believe,

become actuated, and you can feel yourself

writing on the blackboard.

And even more so, when I talk about this steel ball going

that way and this way, you can feel the ball

as if you were me, and you can't do that with a slide.

You can't do it with a picture.

You need to see it in the physical world.

That's why I think that--

oh, yes, of course, it's--

there are speed questions involved, too,

that have to be separated out.

But I think the empathetic mirroring

is why props and the use of a blackboard are so effective.

Well, let's see-- oh, yes, there is one more thing

by way of the tools, and that has

to do with the use of slides.

I repeat, I think they're for exposing ideas,

not for teaching ideas, but that's what we do in a job talk

or conference talk--

expose ideas.

We don't teach them.

So let me tell you a little bit about my views on that.

I remember, once, I was in Terminal A at Logan Airport.

I'd just come back from a really miserable conference,

and the flight was really horrible.

It was one of those that feels like an unbalanced washing

machine.

And for the only time in my life,

I decided to stop on my way to my car and have a cup of coffee

and relax a little bit.

And as I was there for a few minutes, someone came up to me

and said, are you Professor Winston?

I think so, I said.

I don't know.

I guess I was trying to be funny.

In any event, he said, I'm on my way to Europe

to give a job talk.

Would you mine critiquing my slides?

Not at all, I said.

You have too many, and they have too many words.

How did you know, he said, thinking perhaps I

had seen a talk of his before.

I hadn't.

My reply was, because it's always true.

There are always too many slides, always too many words.

So let me show you some extreme examples of how not to use

slides.

Well, for this demonstration, I need to be way over here

and when I get over here, then I can start to say things like,

one of the things you shouldn't do is read your transparencies.

People in your audience know how to read,

and reading will just annoy them.

Also, you should be sure that you

have only a few words on each transparency,

and that the words are easy to read.

And I hope I'm driving you crazy because I'm

committing all kinds of crimes, the first of which

is that there are too many words on the slide.

Second of which is, I'm way over there,

and the slide's way over there.

So you get into this tennis match feeling

of shifting back and forth between the slide

and the speaker.

You want the slides to be condiments to what

you're saying, not the main event or the opposite way

around.

So how can we fix this?

Step number one is to get rid of the background junk.

That's always distraction.

Step number two is to get rid of the words.

When I reduced the words to these,

then everything I read a previous time,

I'm not licensed to say, because it's not on the slide.

I'm not reading my slides anymore,

but I'm saying what was written on the slides

in a previous example.

So what else can we do to simplify this?

Well, we can get rid of the logos.

We don't need them.

Simplification.

What else can we do?

Get rid of the title.

Now, I want to talk to you about some rules for slide

preparation.

I'm telling you the title.

It doesn't have to be up there.

By reducing the number of words on the slide,

I'm allowing you to pay more attention to me

and less to what's written on the slide.

I mentioned it before-- we-- have only one language

processor, and we can either use it to read stuff

or to listen to the speaker.

And so if we have too many words on the slide,

it forces people in the audience to read this stuff

and not listen.

A student of mine did an experiment a few years ago.

He taught some students some web-based programming ideas.

Half the information was on slides, he said the other half,

and then for a control group, he reversed it.

And the question was, what did the subjects--

that is to say, freshmen at his fraternity--

what did the subjects remember best, what he said,

or what they read on the slide?

And the answer is, what they read on the slide.

When their slides have a lot of material on it,

they don't pay attention to the speaker.

In fact, in the after action report, one of the subjects

said, I wish you hadn't talked so much.

It was distracting.

Well, the last item is eliminate clutter.

Here's some clutter.

No reason even for those bullets.

So the too many words problem is a consequence

of a crime Microsoft has committed

by allowing you to use fonts that are too small.

So you should all have a sample slide like this

that you can use to determine what the minimum font

size is that's easily legible.

[INAUDIBLE],, what do you think of those?

AUDIENCE: Which size is right?

PATRICK WINSTON: What's that?

AUDIENCE: Did you ask me what size is right?

PATRICK WINSTON: Yeah, minimum, maybe.

AUDIENCE: 40 or 50.

PATRICK WINSTON: Yeah, he says 40 or 50.

I think that's about right.

35 is beginning to get too small, not necessarily

because you can't read it, but because you're probably

using it to get too many words on the slide.

What other crimes do we have?

Well, we have the laser pointer crime.

And for that-- in the old days, when

we didn't have laser pointers, we used wooden ones,

and people would go waving these things around.

And pretty soon it became almost like a baton twirling contest,

so here's what I recommended in the old days

for dealing with this kind of pointer.

This is an example of use of a prop.

Jim Glass up there saw this talk about 20 years ago,

and said, oh, yeah, I remember that talk.

That's the one where you broke the pointer.

It's amazing how props tend to be

the things that are remembered.

Well, now, we don't have physical pointers anymore.

We've got laser pointers.

It's a wonder more people aren't driven into epileptic fits

over this sort of stuff.

Well, here's what tends to happen.

Look at that.

It's a lovely recursive picture, and I can become part of it

by putting that laser beam right on the back of my head

up there.

Then what do you see?

You see the back of my head.

I have no eye contact, no engagement, nothing.

I was sitting with a student watching a talk one day,

and she said, you know what, we could all leave,

and he wouldn't know.

So what happens when you use a laser pointer?

You can't use a laser pointer without turning your head

and pointing it at something, and when you do that,

you lose contact with the audience.

You don't want to do it.

So what do you do if you need to identify something

in your image, and you don't want

to point at it with a laser?

This is what you do.

Put a little arrow on there and say,

now, look at that guy at the end of arrow number one.

You don't need to have laser pointer to do that.

The too-heavy crime-- when people

ask me to review a presentation, I

ask them to print it out and lay it out on a table.

When they do that, it's easy to see whether the talk is

too heavy, too much text, not enough air, not

enough white space, not enough imagery.

This is a good example of such a talk--

way too heavy.

The presenter has taken advantage of a small font sizes

to get as much on the slide as he wanted.

Lots of other crimes here, but the too-heavy-- the fact

that it's too heavy is what I wanted to illustrate.

So here, by contrast, another talk--

one I gave a few years ago.

It's not-- it wasn't a deeply technical talk,

but I show it to you because there's air in it.

It's mostly pictures of things.

There are three or four slides that have text on them,

but when I come to those, I give the audience time to read them.

And they're there because they might have

some historical significance.

The first slide with a lot of text on it

is an extraction from the 1957--

from the proposal for the 1957 AI conference at Dartmouth.

Extraordinarily interesting event,

and that historical extraction from the proposal

helps drive that point home.

What else have we got here?

Oh, yeah, your vocabulary word for the day.

This is an hapax legomenon.

What that means is, this is the kind of slide

you can get away with exactly once in your presentation.

This is a slide that got some currency some years

ago because it shows the complexity of governing

in Afghanistan by showing how impossibly complex it is.

It's something you in the audience can't understand,

and that's the point, but you can't have many of these.

You can have one per work, one per presentation,

one per paper, one per book.

That's what hapax legomenon is, and this is an example of it.

Well, I've shown you some crimes.

So you might be asking, do these crimes actually occur?

So they do.

[LAUGHTER]

There's the hands in the pockets crime.

There's a crime and time and place selection here.

This is how you get to the Bartos Theater.

First thing you do is you get on these steps

over at the Media Lab, then you cross this large open space,

then you turn right down this corridor.

[LAUGHTER]

At this point, whenever I go in there,

I wonder if there are torture implements around the corner.

[LAUGHTER]

And then when you get in there, you

get into this dark, gloomy place.

So it's well named when they call it the Bartos Theater

because it's a place where you can watch a movie,

but it's not a place where you can give a talk.

Now, on a subject of does it happen,

here's a talk I attended a while back in Stata.

Notice that the speaker is far away from the slides.

Speaker's using a laser pointer.

And you say to me, well, what's happening here?

It's, by the way, the 80th - 80th!

slide of the presentation.

Notice that it extends with the words,

this is the first of 10 conclusions slides.

[LAUGHTER]

So what's the audience reaction?

That's the sponsor of the meeting.

[LAUGHTER]

He's reading his email.

This is the co-sponsor of the meeting.

He's examining the lunch menu.

[LAUGHTER]

What about this person?

This person looks like he's paying attention,

but just because it's a still picture.

If you were to see a video, what you would see

is something like this [YAWNS].

[LAUGHTER]

So yeah, it does happen.

Well, now, that's a quick review of tools.

Now, I want to talk about some special cases.

We could talk a little bit about the informing

or to say another way, doing what I'm doing now.

But I'll just say a few words about that.

In that kind of presentation, you

want to start with a promise like I did for this hour

that we're going through now.

And then it comes to the question

of how do you inspire people?

I've given this talk for a long time,

and a few years ago, our department chairman

said, would you please give this talk to a new faculty,

and be sure to emphasize what it takes to inspire students.

And strangely, I hadn't thought about that question before.

So I started a survey.

I'd talked to some of my incoming freshmen advisees,

and I talked to senior faculty and everything

in between about how they've been inspired.

What I found from the incoming freshmen

is that they were inspired by some high school teacher who

told them they could do it.

What I found in the senior faculty,

they were inspired by someone who

helped them see a problem in a new way.

And what I saw from everyone is that they were inspired when

someone exhibited passion about what they were doing,

exhibited passion about what they were doing.

So that's one way to be inspiring.

It's easy for me because I do artificial intelligence.

And how can you not be interested

in artificial intelligence?

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, if you're not interested in artificial intelligence,

you're probably not interested in interesting things.

So when I'm lecturing in my AI class, it's natural for me

to talk about what I think is cool

and how exciting some new idea is.

So that's the kind of expression of passion

that makes a difference while informing with respect

to this question of inspiring.

Oh, yeah and of course, during this promise phase,

you can also express how cool stuff is.

Let me give you an example of a lecture that starts this way.

I'm talking about resource allocation.

It's the same sort of stuff you would think of when your--

it's the same sort of ideas you would

need if you're allocating aircraft to a flight schedule

or trying to schedule a factory or something like that.

But the example is putting colors

on the states in the United States

without any bordering states having the same color.

So here it goes.

This is what I show at the beginning of the class.

This is a way of doing that coloring.

And you might say, well, why don't we wait till it finishes?

Would you like to do that?

No?

Well, we're not going to wait till it finishes

because the sun will have exploded and consumed the earth

before this program finishes.

[LAUGHTER]

But with a slight adjustment to how the program works, which

I tell my students you will understand in the next 50

minutes, this is what you get.

Isn't that cool?

You got to be amazed by stuff that

takes a computation from longer than the lifetime

of the solar system into a few seconds.