Notes from watching Patrick Winston's How To Speak by Patrick Winston. It is recommended in Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?. It's wonderful. While it is heavily oriented towards academia, I believe the principles are universal enough to be applied to elsewhere. Here are my main takeaways.

How to Start

First of all, if you want to acknowledge collaborators for you projects, you should do it in the first slide. Do not end your talk with this. Then, you can start with an empowerment promise and set up the expectation of the audience. It's also a good idea to explain how cool is the stuff, if your talk is to inform.

Heuristics for delivering the content

There are several samples to make your talk more interesting/engaging.

You should cycle on the subject, so that the audience can follow along a bit easier. Adding verbal punctuation is also a good idea to pace your talk. You can go through the outline at the middle of the talk, enumerate the topics you've gone through, and re-iterate how the talk has developed to. This gives the audience some breathing room to digest your talk, and provides a seam that connects all the dots.

I am not sure how to interpret "building fence around your ideas" in a non-academic talk. I guess you can compare with similar projects or alternatives, and try to draw a separating lines between them.

Asking a question can be a useful technique, but make sure the question is either too easy or too hard.

Tools/Time/Place

It's recommended to have your talk around 11AM in a well-lit room that ideally should be 50% occupied during your talk. However, it's usually not easy to have full control on these factors so I'd say try your best.

If possible, writing on a board is better than presenting slides via a laptop. A board has several useful attributes such as easy to draw graphics, appropriate speed for audience to follow, and serves as a target for your hands. It also avoids many pitfalls for using a slide.

If you need to use slides, follow these guidelines:

• Do not read
• Be in the image
• Keep images simple
• Eliminate clutter

You can have a hapax legomenon once in a presentation.

Persuading

Again this is heavily oriented toward job talks in academia. I think the takeaway for me is that you show aim to present yourself within 5 minutes, with your vision and contributions. For vision, describe the problem you're trying to solve and your approach.

The concept of Winston'star is quite interesting - when describing your contributions you should include the following:

• Symbol
• Slogan
• Surprise
• Salient
• Story

As for why you should spend some time to practice this...

You get used to being famous, but you never get used to being ignored.

How to stop

At the last slide, highlights your contributions.

End your talk with a joke if possible.

I always finish with a joke, and that way people think they've had fun the whole time

Do not say thank you at the end. Instead, salute the audience.