MIT Professor and AI Pioneer Patrick Winston on How To Speak

I recently found out about this video featuring the late MIT professor Patrick Winston’s talk How To Speak. From the description:

Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.

Professor Winston has this presentation nailed down, hitting the beats and keeping people engaged. He even gets some laughs, which, even after 40 years of presenting this talk, must still have felt good.

If you haven’t seen this, take an hour and enjoy. I’ve watched this once, and pretty quickly, I knew a second viewing to take some notes about the big ideas would be required.

MIT Press also published Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade by Professor Winston. I’ve added it to my reading list.

This course is part of the MIT OpenCourseWare program, which offers thousands of courses available for free to anyone without payment or registration. It’s a knowledge rabbit hole that I want to some time exploring, and I hope you do too!