2022/06/12

How to Speak


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MIT How to Speak, IAP 2018 Instructor: Patrick Winston View the complete course: https://ocw.mit.edu/how_to_speak 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. 00:16 - Introduction 03:11 - Rules of Engagement 04:15 - How to Start 05:38 - Four Sample Heuristics 10:17 - The Tools: Time and Place 13:24 - The Tools: Boards, Props, and Slides 36:30 - Informing: Promise, Inspiration, How To Think 41:30 - Persuading: Oral Exams, Job Talks, Getting Famous 53:06 - How to Stop: Final Slide, Final Words 56:35 - Final Words: Joke, Thank You, Examples License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA More information at https://ocw.mit.edu/terms More courses at https://ocw.mit.edu .
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How to Speak: Speaking Tips from Patrick Winston

How to Speak: Speaking Tips from Patrick Winston

How to Speak: 7 Speaking Tips from Patrick Henry Winston

Published: Mar 24th, 2008

How to Speak Patrick WinstonEach year, MIT professor Patrick Henry Winston delivers an open lecture entitled How to Speak.

Positive word of mouth spread over the years, and the event now draws a beyond capacity crowd with people sitting uncomfortably on steps and the floor to listen to Winston. You can learn from the master teacher from the comfort of your web browser by viewing the lecture videos.

In the 45-minute lecture, Winston delivers dozens of practical tips for speaking effectively, particularly when teaching. This article highlights seven of the best.

Seven Speaking Tips from Patrick Winston

1. Use Stories and Analogies

Winston explicitly advises his audience to use stories, and he does so himself.

One example is in the introduction. Winston skis better than gymnast Mary Lou Retton not because he is more athletic, but because he has some knowledge and he practices. This story reinforces his key message: knowledge and practice are critical to speaking success.

2. Open Your Speech Strong

Winston advises against a humorous opening, and instead recommends making a promise (stating your core message) and providing a speech outline.

He does this himself in his introduction. In addition, he opens with a great analogy between the military and educational institutions. His first words — “The uniform code of military justice states…” — grab the attention of his academic audience.

3. Use Rhetorical Devices

Winston doesn’t explicitly advise using rhetorical devices (aside from rhetorical questions), but he provides several memorable examples.

For example, here is a memorable triad which invokes the Rule of Three:

Your careers will be determined largely by how well you speak, by how well you write, and by the quality of your ideas… in that order.

Another memorable line uses contrast to achieve its effect:

What I hope to accomplish is to transmit to you […] something that will make the difference between a career-busting tragedy and a career-launching triumph.

4. Find Your Style

Winston reveals the big four around which he crafts his lectures: cycle, verbal punctuation, near miss, and rhetorical questions. More importantly, he emphasizes that these are his big four, but every speaker needs to find their own public speaking structure.

5. Use the Blackboard to Pace Your Delivery

Winston gives several reasons to use the blackboard (or whiteboard or flip chart), but the most compelling reason is to pace your delivery. The act of writing or drawing introduces delays which allow your audience to catch up and absorb the information.

6. Salute the Audience Rather than Thanking Them

Many speakers I respect take a very strong position in the debate over whether you should thank or not thank your audience. Winston takes the position that you should not thank the audience, because doing so conveys a lack of confidence that you have just delivered something valuable. Instead, he suggests that you should salute the audience.

7. Handle the Q&A Skillfully

Winston delivers several nuggets of advice for question and answer sessions. Be prepared to ask yourself the first question. Repeat the question so that the rest of the audience can hear it. Aim for a conversation, not a lecture. Stay in control. This advice agrees with a previous Six Minutes article: Leading the Perfect Q&A.

More Resources on How to Speak…

Cal Newport provides a detailed play-by-play of the 2008 Winston talk which he attended.

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The Sea of Fertility - Wikipedia Yukio Mishima

The Sea of Fertility - Wikipedia

The Sea of Fertility

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The Sea of Fertility (豊饒の海, Hōjō no Umi) is a tetralogy of novels written by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. The four novels are Spring Snow (1969),[1] Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971).[2] The series, which Mishima began writing in 1964 and which was his final work, is usually thought of as his masterpiece. Its title refers to the Mare Fecunditatis, a lunar mare.

Plot[edit]

The main timeline of the story stretches from 1912 to 1975. The viewpoint of all four books is that of Shigekuni Honda, a law student in Spring Snow who eventually becomes a wealthy retired judge in The Decay of the Angel. Each of the novels depicts what Honda comes to believe are successive reincarnations of his schoolfriend Kiyoaki Matsugae, and Honda's attempts to save them from the early deaths to which they seem to be condemned by karma. This results in both personal and professional embarrassment for Honda, and eventually destroys him.

The friend's successive reincarnations are:

  1. Kiyoaki Matsugae, a young aristocrat
  2. Isao Iinuma, a nationalist and violent extremist
  3. Ying Chan, an indolent Thai princess
  4. Tōru Yasunaga, a manipulative and sadistic orphan

Other characters who appear in more than one book include Satoko Ayakura (Kiyoaki's lover), Tadeshina (Satoko's maid), Imperial Prince Toin, Shigeyuki Iinuma (Kiyoaki's servant and Isao's father), Keiko Hisamatsu, and Rié (Honda's wife).

Background[edit]

Although The Temple of Dawn contains lengthy arguments in favour of the concept of reincarnation, Mishima's biographers note that he did not believe in it himself.[3] An earlier work of about the same length, Kyoko's House, had been spurned by critics; it has been conjectured that he embarked on The Sea of Fertility in defiant response. It expresses many of Mishima's deepest-held convictions about the nature and purposes of human life, and the last book is thought to encapsulate an (extremely negative) personal assessment of himself and his own legacy.[4]

Response[edit]

The tetralogy was described by Paul Theroux as "the most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century". Charles Solomon wrote in 1990 that "the four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author's life and work."[5] Although the first book, Spring Snow, is a loving recreation of Japan in the brief Taishō period, and is well-grounded in its time and place, references to current affairs are generally tangential to what is later to become Honda's obsessive quest to understand the workings of individual fate and to save his friend.[citation needed] Richard T. Kelly wrote that the tetralogy reveals "all his gifts – an eye for detail and scene-making, a sensuous regard for the physical, and a cool detachment that could be terrifying in its terseness."[6]

Yasser Nasser of The Bubble said that "the first book is by far the best, presenting a vision of Japan that is both alien and relatable to the Western reader."[7]

The literary historian Marleigh Ryan, however, was less sympathetic. In 1974, she wrote, "The outstanding weakness of this, the final novelistic effort of Mishima Yukio—and indeed the major failing of the bulk of his work—is its striking inability to rise above the emotional and intellectual limitations of its author."[8]

Volumes[edit]

  1. Spring Snow (春の雪, Haru no Yuki), 1965–1967, published 1969
  2. Runaway Horses (奔馬, Honba), 1967–1968, published 1969
  3. The Temple of Dawn (暁の寺, Akatsuki no Tera), 1968–1970, published 1970
  4. The Decay of the Angel (天人五衰, Tennin Gosui), 1970–1971, published 1971

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Sato, Hideaki; Inoue, Takashi (2005). 決定版 三島由紀夫全集・第42巻・年譜・書誌 [Final edition-Yukio Mishima complete works No.42-Biographical sketch and Bibliography] (in Japanese). Shinchosha. pp. 304, 550.
  2. ^ The Yukio Mishima Cyber Museum. Village Yamanaka. Accessed May 22, 2008.
  3. ^ "The Decay of the Angel". The New York Times. Retrieved March 10, 2012.
  4. ^ John Nathan (1974). Mishima: A Biography. Boston, Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-59844-5.
  5. ^ Solomon, Charles (1990-05-13). "Spring Snow Runaway Horses The Temple of Dawn The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima (Vintage: $10.95 each)". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2020-10-07.
  6. ^ Kelly, Richard T. (2011-06-03). "Rereading: The Sea of Fertility tetralogy by Yukio Mishima". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-10-07.
  7. ^ Nasser, Yasser (2014-05-14). "Spring Snow". The Bubble. Retrieved 2020-10-07.
  8. ^ Marleigh Ryan, "The Mishima Tetralogy", Journal of Japanese Studies 1.1 (Autumn 1974): 165–173. https://www.jstor.org/stable/133441


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