How to Speak

[Music] you 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 an 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 you're 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 that came to me uh 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 a was Mary Lou Retton famous Olympic gymnast perfect tens of the vault and I heard that she was a novice of skiing so when the opportunity arrived I looked over on a novice slope and

saw this young woman who when she became unbalanced but 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 a bullet Olympic athlete an outstanding one and I was a better skier because I had decay and I had to pee and all she had was the tea 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 adheres 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 what will be the one that gets you the job and so this is a very nonlinear process you never know when it's going to happen but that is my promise for the end of the next 60 minutes you know they've been exposed to a lot of ideas some of which you'll

incorporate into your own repertoire enable 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 is a rule of engagement and the answer is we humans only have one language processor and if your language processor is inkay 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 to distract all 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 work there or 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 you 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 to 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 to 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 in 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 be 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 around it begin go around to begin some people say so much you want to tell them tell them again and then tell them 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 in any given moment about twenty percent of you will be fogged out no matter what the lecture is so if you want to ensure 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 no 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 it's not 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 Josie's algorithm except his is exponential in - 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 built is verbal punctuation some enumerated and providing numbers I'm giving you a sense that there's a seam in the talk and you

can get back back on ok so now we're on a roll and since we're on a roll can you guess what forth idea might be here an idea that helps people get back on the bus yes 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 count to seven seconds it seems 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 what the answer is can't be too hard because then nobody will have anything to say so here are some sample heuristics so you can put in your armamentarium and build up your your repertoire of ideas about presentation and now if this persuade you that there is something to know that there there is knowledge then I've already succeeded because what I want to convince you of is that 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 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 in 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 a.m. yeah and the reason is most people that might

er wait 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 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 weather 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 are the original people to 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 ayahs what else can you say about the place well the place should be cased and I mean that in a cloak Royal sense of like if you're robbing a bank you would go to the bank and you know some some occasions before to see what

it's like so there's no surprises when you when you do your robbery so whenever I go somewhere to speak the first thing I asked my host to do is to take me to the place where I'll be speaking so there any weirdnesses I'll be able to 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 imagine that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm animals 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 it should be the case that ain't know if there are ten 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 size place that's doesn't have to be packed that it has to be more than half full so those are some thoughts about time and place the next thing I want to talk about is

subjective the boards and props and slides well these are the tools of the trade I believe that this is the this is a the right tool for speaking when their purpose is informing the slides are good when your purpose is exposing but it's what I use when I'm informing teaching lecturing and there are 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 a graphic quality that I like and next thing I like is that like a 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 now is's 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 and back like this I was once in a convent in Serbia and my host well we were 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 when he said eat that stuff or die it's a question of a local custom and and Colitis but then before anything happened there the nun pulled my hands off like this because it was extraordinarily insulting in

that culture to have your hands behind your back so why is that well it's it usually is suppose that that's that it has to do with whether you're concealing a weapon such 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 of 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 scene where Patrick gave a lecture I thought it was terrific so I

went a second time first time to absorb the content second time to note the style and what I discovered is that Patrick was constantly pointing at the board and then I thought about 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 a effective technique so that's just a little bit about the virtue of black boards now I want to talk about props you know the custodians of knowledge about props are the playwrights many decades ago I saw play

by henrik ibsen it was head of gambler I remember vaguely there 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 they were copying machines and computers anyhow anyhow as the play opens there's a potbelly stove and in the beginning of the play the pot-bellied stove with its open door just has some slightly glowing

embers but the public stove is always there and it's tension melts in the play and you see this manuscript this prop the Ipsen so artfully use 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 images know that that manuscript is going to go into that fire it's memorable thing is what I remember about play so playwrights have got this all figured out but in their hand they're not the only people who can use props here's an example of the use of

a prop also due to see more pepper 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 that makes it possible for you to embarrass your friends and Mechanical Engineering so here's what you do take this bicycle wheel you started spinning and then you put some torque on the axle or equivalently you blow on the edge and the issue is as we go that way or does it go that way now the mechanical engineers will immediately say oh yes I see

right hand screw rule and they'll put their fingers in this position but forget exactly how to align their fingers with various aspects of a problem and so it's usually the case that they get it right with about a 50 percent probability so they're a very fancy education gets them up to the point where they are 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 at this point you blow on that with a puff of air forgetting about the rest of the wheel what happens to that little piece is under the duct tape it must want to go that way but you bang another 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 it the wheel goes over like that and so now you'll never wonder again because he's thinking about the problem in the right way and it's demonstrated by use of a problem you could try this after we're done another example I like to remember is one from when I was taking 801 Ella 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 26100 attached to a much bigger steel ball the one not one like this and

Lazarus took the ball up against a wall like this he put his head right against the wall to steady himself and then he let go and the pendulum takes many seconds ago over and back and then gently kisses Lazarus his 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 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 you know

it's interesting whenever surveys are taken students always say more chalk less PowerPoint and why would that be props are always 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 though I'm not wearing this way you can you

can 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 a physical world that's why I think that oh yes of course it's there their speed questions involved to that have to be separated out but I think that 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 therefore 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 some in Terminal A at Logan Airport I 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 mind 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'd seen a talk of his before I hadn't

my reply was because it's always true they're always too many slides always too many words so let me show you some extreme examples of how not to use smarts well for this demonstration I need to be way over here and that 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 their words

are easy to read and I hope it 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 slides 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 chunk 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 it was written on the slice 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 doesn't have to be up there by reducing the number of words on the slide I mean allow you to pay more attention to me unless so 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 forces people in the audience to redo stuff and not 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 a freshman in 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'll 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 I hear some clutter and we know 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 some 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 this this is easily legible Shira what do you think of those what's that you know minimum maybe you know he says forty or fifty I think it's

about right thirty-five is if you get too small not necessarily because you can't read it but because it 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 meant for that everyone you know in the old days when we didn't have laser pointer skis 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 his way recommended in the old days for dealing with this kind of pointer

this example of use of a prop Jim glass up there so let's talk about twenty years ago and so yeah I remembered that talk that's one way you broke the pointer it's amazing how props tend to be the things that are remembered well now we don't have we don't have a little pointers anymore we've got we've got laser pointers that's a wonder more people aren't driven into epileptic fits over this first well here's what tends to happen oh yeah that's a lovely recursive picture and I could 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 and I have no eye contact no engagement nothing I was sitting I was 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 the laser pointer you can't use the laser pointer without turning your head and pointing at something and when you do that you lose 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 out it with a laser this is what you do put a little arrow on there and say now look at that guy number one at the end of arrow number one you don't need to have a laser pointer to do that the too heavy crime when people ask me to review a presentation I asked someone 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 than the white space not enough imagery this is a good example of such a talk way too heavy now this is the presenter has taken advantage of small font sizes to get as much on the slide as he wanted lots of other crimes here but the two heaviness the fact that it's too heavy is what I wanted to illustrate so here by contrasts another talk when I gave a few years ago it's not it wasn't a deeply technical talk but I'll 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 will have text on it as a extraction from the nineteen fifty-seven from the for the 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 oh we got here oh yeah your vocabulary word for the day this

is an app packs legoman on what that means is this is the kind of slide you can get away with exactly once in your presentation this is a slide at their 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 we you and 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 for presentation one for paper one per book that's what I that's what epic slow going on is

and this is an example of it well I'll show you some crimes and so you might be asking do these crimes actually occur so they do theirs the hands in the pockets crime there's a crime in 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 at this point whenever I go in there I wonder if they're torture implements around the corner and then

when you get in there you get into this dark gloomy place so it's well-named what 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 subjective doesn't happen here's a talk I attended a while back in Stata notice that the speaker is far away from the slides speakers using a laser pointer and you say to me well what's happening here is by the way the 80th 80th slide in the presentation notice that it's dense with

words the first of ten conclusion slides so what's the audience reaction that's the sponsor of the meeting he's reading his email this is the co-sponsor of the meeting he's examining the lunch menu [Music] what about this person this person looks like he's paying attention but that's because it's a still picture if you were to see a video what you would see is something like this so yeah it does happen well now that's a a quick review of tools now I want to talk about some special cases I could talk a little bit about informing or

to say another way doing what I'm doing now but I'll just say a few words about that and that kind of in that kind of presentation you want to start with a promise like I did for this for this for this hour that we're going now but then there comes 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 say I 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 talked to some of my incoming freshmen advisees and I talked to those 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 when I found in the senior faculty they were inspired by someone who helped them to 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 passionate about what they are doing yeah so that's not that's one way to be inspiring it's easy for me because you know I do artificial intelligence and how can you not be interested in artificial intelligence right 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 its natural for me to talk about what I think is cool and how exciting some new idea is so that's the kind of 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 source 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 goes this is what I show in 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 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 know you got you got to be you got to be amazed by stuff that takes a computation from longer than the lifetime of the solar system into a few seconds so that's why I mean by providing a promise upfront and expressing some passion about what you're talking about well the last item in this little block here is it has to do with what people think that they do at MIT you ask faculty what the most important purpose is and they'll say well the most important thing I do is teach people

how to think and then you say oh that's great how do you teach people how to think blank stare no one can quite respond to that part that natural next question so how do you teach people how to think well I believe that we are storytelling animals and that we start developing our story understanding of manipulating skills with fairy tales in childhood and continue on through professional schools like law business medicine engineering everything and we continue doing that throughout life so if that is what thinking is all about then when you want to teach people

how to think you provided them with the stories they need to know the questions they need to ask about those stories mechanisms for analyzing those stories ways of putting stories together ways of evaluating how reliable the story is and that's what I think you need to do when you teach people how to think but that's all about education and many of you here not necessarily for that but rather for for this part for persuading which breaks down into several categories oral exams not shown chopped talks getting famous I won't say much about oral exams other

than the fact that they used to be a lot scarier than they are today in the old days reading the literature in a foreign language was part of that and there was a high failure rate and when you look at when you look back on those failures the most usual reason for people failing an oral exam is failure to situate and a failure to practice if I situate I mean it's important to talk about your research in context this is the problems being pursued all over the world there hasn't been any progress before me in

past 30 years everyone is looking for a solution because it will have impact on so many other things such situating in time and place and feel and then as far as practice is concerned but yes practice is important but that doesn't mean showing your slides to the people who share an office with the problem with that is that if people know what you're doing they will host Nate that there's material in their presentation it isn't it isn't there a very each month seen by the way is your faculty supervisor is not a very good person

to help you debug a talk because they in fact know what you're doing and they will in fact Colusa Nate there's material in your presentation isn't there so you need to get together some friends who don't know what you're doing and have them well you start the practice session by saying if you can't make me cry I won't value as a friend anymore and then when you get to the faculty on a oral exam it will be easy it's a difficulty or the amount of flack you'll get from somebody is proportional to age the older

somebody is they're more the more they understand whether they are in the world but but the young people are trying to show the old people how smart they are so it's a lovely vicious so whenever you have an opportunity to have an examining committee that's full of people with great hair that's what you want well that's just a word or two about something I haven't listened here let's get into the subject of job talks so I was sitting at a bar many years ago in San Diego I was remember the Navy Science Board and I

was saying with a couple of my colleagues on the board dolorous editor from the University of Colorado she made me some jealous I could spit because she had bitten 21 books and I've only written 17 and then the other one was Oh bill Weldon from the University of Texas he was a electromagnetism guy and you know he knew how to use railguns to to drive steel rods through tank armor these are interesting people so I said what do you for a faculty candidate and within the one microsecond Delores said that to show us they've got

some kind of vision quickly followed by Bill who said they have to show us that they've done something know what sounds good I said and then I said to them how long does the candidate have to establish these two things what do you think well compare your answer to the airs five minutes so if you haven't expressed your vision if you haven't told people you've done something in five minutes you're are you're are you've already lost so you have to be able to do that and let me just mention a couple of things in that

connection here which is you know the vision is in part a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your approach so the problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence and the approach is asking questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals is it merely a matter of quantity or we're just a little bit smarter in some continuous way or do we have something that's fundamentally different that chimpanzees don't have and Neanderthals either and the answer is yes we do have something different we are symbolic creatures and because we're symbolic creatures

we can we can build symbolic descriptions of relations and events we can string them together and make stories and because we can make stories that's what makes us different so that's that's that's my stump speech that's how I start most of my talks on my own personal research how do you express the notion that you've done something by listening the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the solution of that problem you don't have to have done all those steps but you can say here's here's what needs to be done an example

here's what needs to be done we need to specify some behavior we need to enumerate the constraints that make it possible to deal with that behavior we have to implement a system because we're engineers and we don't think that we've understood something unless we can build it and we built such a system and we're about to demonstrate it to you today that would be an example of a numerating series of steps needed to realize the vision so then bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla and then you conclude by you conclude by enumerating your

contributions it's kind of mirror of of these steps and helps to establish that you've done something so that's a kind of general purpose framework for doing a technical talk no only a few more things left to do today getting famous is the next item on our agenda because once you've got the job you need to think a little bit about how you're going to be recognized for what you do so [Music] Oh first of all why should you care about getting famous I thought about this connection with a fundraising event I attended once fundraising event

for raising money to save Venice from going underwater and having all of its art destroyed anyway I was sitting here and JC was sitting here that was a Julia CH like Julia Child and as the evening wore on more and more people would come up and ask Julia to autograph something or express a feeling that she had changed their life and just happened over and over again so eventually I turned to Julia and I said miss child is it fun to be famous and she thought about it for a second and she said you get

used to it but you know what occurred to me you never get used to being ignored so it's you know it's it's here's a way to think about it your ideas are like your children you don't want them to go into the world and rags so what I wanted to do is to be sure that you have these techniques these mechanisms these thoughts about how to present the ideas that you have so that they recognize the value that is in them so that's why it's a legitimate thing to concern yourself with with packaging now how

do you get remembered well there's something I like to call Winston Starr and every one of the items I'm about to articulate has a starts with an S so if you want your presentation ideas to be remembered one of the things you need to do is to make sure that you have some kind of symbol associated with your work so this Arjun example is actually from my PhD thesis many many years ago and in the course of my work at that time this worked on arts learning became mildly famous and I didn't know why it

was only many years later that I realized that that work accidentally had all of the elements on this star so the first element is that there was a kind of symbol it's the arts itself next thing you need is some kind of slogan a kind of phrase that provides a handle on the work and in this case the phrase was one-shot learning and it was one-shot because the program I wrote learned something definite from every example that was presented to us so in going from a model based on this configuration to something that isn't an

arts based on that configuration the program learned that it has to be on top one-shot learning so that's a simple slogan and now we need a surprise yeah the surprise is you don't need a million examples of something to learn you can do it with one example if you're smart enough to make use of that example appropriately so that was the surprise you can learn something definite from each example next item was a salient idea now when I say salient idea I don't mean important what I mean is an idea that sticks out some some

theses funnily enough have too many good ideas and you don't know what it's all about because which one is it so you need an idea that sticks out and the idea that stuck out here was noticed I'm a near-miss you see this is not an arch but it doesn't miss by much so it's a near miss finally you need to tell the story of how you did it how it works why it's important so that's some a bit on how do not so much get famous but how to ensure that your work is recognized well

doctor we're almost finished because now we're down in this last item which is so how to stop and when we come back there's a question of alright well what is the final slide and what are the final words so for the sign of final slide let me give you some examples of possibilities how about this one well you might see that slide and think to yourself there are a thousand faculty at MIT nice piece of work but not so much but it's only a tiny piece of work if you invited by a thousand so when

you show a whole gigantic list of collaborators at the end of a talk it's so kind of it's a it's it's it's kind of led out because it suggests that nobody knows whoa did you do anything significant there you got it you got to recognize your collaborators right so where do you do that none of the last line on the first slide all this was on the first slide these are the collaborators so you don't want to put them at the end you know what a slide like this how about this one this is the

worst possible way to end a talk because this slide can be up there for 20 minutes I've seen it happen it's squanders real estate it squanders an opportunity to tell people who you are it's just what about this one I often see it I never seen anybody write it down also it wastes opportunity oh my god [Music] even worse all of these slides do nothing for you they waste an opportunity for you to tell people to leave people with what you with who you are well what about this this is a good one it might

seem so at first but here's the problem if you say these are my conclusions these are perfectly legitimate conclusions that nobody cares about what they care about is what you have done and that's why your final slide should have this label contributions it's a mirror of what I said over there about how job talks on to that ought to be like a sandwich and the final slide the one that's up there while people are asking questions and filing out it ought to be the one that has your contributions on here's an example from my own

stump speech yeah this is what I talk about a lot yes here are the things that I typically demonstrate and I wait for people to read it and then the final element there is this is what we get out of it so that's a sample of a contribution slide all right now what about the other part you know you get your final slide up slide up there is a contribution slide somehow you have to tell pee or you're finished so let's say check out a few possibilities one thing you could do in the final words

is you could tell a joke it's okay by the time you're done people have adjusted themselves your voice parameters they're ready for a joke I was sitting in another bar this time in Austin Texas with a colleague of mine named Doug Lynott and Doug's a fantastic speaker and so I said to Doug Doug you're a fantastic speaker what's your secret and he said oh I always finished with a joke and that way people think they've had fun the whole time so yeah a joke will work down there how about this one thank you I don't

recommend it so we move you will not go to hell if you conclude your talk by saying thank you but it's a weak move and here's why when you say thank you even worse thank you for listening it suggests that everybody has stayed that long out of politeness and that they had a profound desire to be somewhere else but they're so polite they stuck it out and that's what you're thinking of before so what's wild applause that started you can mal thank you and it's not there's nothing wrong with that the last thing you do

should not be saying thank you how do you say to me well doesn't everybody say thank you well what everybody does is not necessarily the right thing and I like to illustrate how some talks can end without saying thank you I like to draw from political speeches but the ones that I've heard recently aren't so good so I'm gonna have to go go back a little bit so here's a Governor Christie he gave the Republican keynote address one year this is the end of his talk let's see what he does and together everybody together we

will stand up once again for American greatness for our children and grandchildren god bless you and God bless america that's on a classic and addiction ending god bless you bless america now I don't want to be partisan about this so I think I better switch to the keynote address and the Democratic convention I was delivered that year by by Bill Clinton who knows something about how to speak you believe you must vote and you must really [Applause] ooh now watch this let's go back a little bit and redo it what I want you to see

is that at one point is he would be almost pressing his lips together forcing himself not to say thank you and then there's another place where he does a little salute so much for those this time around [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Ezra's person his lips where's the sweet [Applause] yeah I think that's pretty good now what are we gonna take away from this well I suppose I gave you clued this sock by saying god bless you and God bless you that it's the suit of technology but it might not work so well but what you can't

get out is you don't have to say thank you well there are other things you can do and you know it's interesting that over time people figure this out in their some stock ways of ending things so in the Catholic Church and they've got a Latin Mass let it win it's a this test which translates approximately to okay the mass is over you can go home now and of course at the musical concerts you know that it's time to clap not at the end of the song but rather when the conductor goes over and shakes

hands with a concert master those are conventions that tell you that that the event is over so those are all possibilities for here but there's one more possibility and that is that you can salute the audience and by that I mean you could say something about how much you value your time at a place so I could say well it's been a big fun being here it's been fascinating to see what you folks are doing here at MIT I've been what stimulated and provoked by the kinds of questions you would ask us been really great

and and I look forward to coming back many occasions in the future so that salutes the audience you could do that well there it is you know what I'm glad you're here and the reason is by being here I think you have demonstrated an understanding that how you present and how you package your ideas as an important thing and I salute you for that and I suggest that you come back again and bring your friends you you