Public Speaking

Speaking well is a learnable craft and it is taught almost nowhere. People are told to be confident, to make eye contact, and to imagine the audience in their underwear, none of which is instruction. What is actually going on in a good talk is a set of specific, describable decisions about structure, evidence and timing, and those can be learned in an afternoon and then practised for years.

The course opens with Patrick Winston's How to Speak, an MIT lecture he gave annually for four decades. It is the least fashionable video here and the most useful — an hour of concrete rules from someone who taught the subject to engineers, delivered without a single motivational sentence. Everything after it is refinement.

The middle is structure and delivery, taught partly by example: Simon Sinek's talk is included less for its argument than because it is a clean demonstration of the shape Nancy Duarte describes in the lesson before it. Will Stephen's six-minute parody sits deliberately at the end of that module, because watching someone perform every signal of a great talk while saying absolutely nothing is the fastest way to learn which parts are technique and which are substance.

The last module is the part called public speaking least often and used most: listening, and holding a conversation. Roughly four hours on the required path, and about thirteen with the optional lessons — two full courses, a module on the fear itself, and more on the mechanics of voice and delivery. The only way any of it becomes real is by giving a talk, so plan one — a meeting, a lightning talk, anything with an audience that can leave.