How to Speak

I was lucky enough to get paid for this but I'll say it anyway: learning to speak is the only thing of lasting value I have gotten out of startup accelerators. I would have gladly drop a few grand to acquire that skill. In fact, I'm considering hiring a speaking coach to improve. I've historically been a strong written communicator, but it turns out that speaking is very different from writing. In fact, I had thought of myself as a pretty strong speaker due to my experience giving scholarly presentations ... how wrong I was. Academic talks are a different beast altogether. If you haven't seen Patrick Winston's How to Speak lecture [0], drop what you're doing and watch it now. I'll leave you with a (paraphrased) quote from his lecture: your ideas are like your children and you don't want to send them off into the world dressed in rags. [0] [this video]

If your goal is to learn how to tell a story to a live audience see this: [this video] Otherwise I'd suggest you read up a lot of literature, start with classic folk tales like those collected by the brothers Grimm. The more you read the easier it will become to write a proper story. Lastly as you're reading I'd suggest you start writing material yourself and maybe publishing it online on some web novel sites. At first people will be very critical of what you have written, but with time it should change for the better. Lastly, writing is a habit, just like coding. A habit should be repeated daily to become stronger. Read and write each day, unless you're feeling foggy or in need of rest. After a certain amount of time it should just click, but realize that that amount of time varies from person to person, some may never break that threshold, others are talented and are able to break through just like that. Best of luck!

Patrick Winston (1943-2019) was a computer scientist at MIT. Every year he gave a popular talk titled How to Speak . Here is a recording of the talk from 2018: How To Speak by Patrick Winston : [this video] A book of his insights was published in 2020: Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform . I'm half-way through the book and it is good so far. Although the book pitches itself as suitable for anyone who writes or speaks, many of the examples in the book have an emphasis on speaking in an academic or teaching setting. However, there are good insights that anyone can learn from. I recommend watching the talk above first to help you decide whether the book will appeal to you (the material in the lecture is in the book as are additional insights). There are lots of reviews of the book on the Amazon US site too.

Ah I guess if you’re very bad at presentations, then this could be beneficial. However, scientific presentations are meant to be communicating science and making things stick to your audience (no matter if it’s scientists or children you’re presenting to). This does not fix that problem at all. For anyone thinking of using this: please watch: [this video] and maybe a talk from Jane Goodall on how to engagingly show your science. I would hate to see a lot of conference presentations be made with this generator. Another thing that improved my personal presentation skills was noting down why I liked a presentation or why I didn’t - what specific things a person did to make it engaging. Just paying attention to that improved my presentation skills enormously