Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform

by Patrick Henry Winston

The essentials of communication for professionals, educators, students, and entrepreneurs, from organizing your thoughts to inspiring your audience. Do you give presentations at meetings? Do you ever have to explain a complicated subject to audiences unfamiliar with your field? Do you make pitches for ideas or products? Do you want to interest a lecture hall of restless students in subjects that you find fascinating? Then you need this book. Make It Clear explains how to communicate—how to speak and write to get your ideas across. Written by an MIT professor who taught his students these techniques for more than forty years, the book starts with the basics—finding your voice, organizing your ideas, making sure what you say is remembered, and receiving critiques (“do not ask for brutal honesty”)—and goes on to cover such specifics as preparing slides, writing and rewriting, and even choosing a type family. The book explains why you should start with an empowerment promise and conclude by noting you delivered on that promise. It describes how a well-crafted, explicitly identified slogan, symbol, salient idea, surprise, and story combine to make you and your work memorable. The book lays out the VSN-C (Vision, Steps, News–Contributions) framework as an organizing structure and then describes how to create organize your ideas with a “broken–glass” outline, how to write to be understood, how to inspire, how to defeat writer's block—and much more. Learning how to speak and write well will empower you and make you smarter. Effective communication can be life-changing—making use of just one principle in this book can get you the job, make the sale, convince your boss, inspire a student, or even start a revolution.

Genres: Writing, Communication, Nonfiction, Self Help, Business, Leadership, Personal Development

360 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2020

Reviews

[Carlos Martinez]

A few useful hints. Mainly relevant to those pursuing a career in academia. Too many quotes from Winston Churchill and James Watson, thereby exceeding my white supremacy tolerance threshold by quite some distance. Nonetheless, some ideas that I'll endeavour to put to use.

[Neil]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...

[Matthew]

One of *the* most practical books on what is required to be an effective communicator in professional settings.

[Walter Underwood]

Writing advice for engineers, so don't look for thrilling prose. This is a "just the facts" book that delivers on the promise of the title. In fact, one of the main themes of the book is to promise something and deliver on it.

I'll be using this framework for the next several things I write. It already makes me want to go back and re-do some presentations that just didn't quite work.

[David]

This book is so boring it just lists bullet points ans other random stuff. It should have been a blog post and summarised in 3 pages.

The only reason this got 1 a star is

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything" Eisenhower 1957

And I liked the quote.

[Caio Andrade]

Ótimo. Alô, editoras brasileiras. Você mesma, dona Rocco. Mas no precinho.

[Max]

Winston’s seminal work on speaking expands on his extremely popular annual lecture, “How to Speak” (available on YouTube). By providing a practical framework, simple rules, and instructive examples Winston makes it easy for anyone to become a better communicator. When Winston passed away I was motivated to read all of his books, and I have been inspired beyond my expectations.

[Bobby]

Super quick bare bones framework to speak well.

[Ambivert]

Some gems of idea. At some point, I felt like this book is preparing you on your next Ted Talk speech. Went through it as audio book.

[Piyush Gupta]

Really good book. Towards the end it gets kinda fluffy but it's still worth reading. I would actually watch his 1 hour lecture on youtube prior to reading this book so you know what you're getting into. It confirms a lot of stuff I've learned (and unlearned) over the years as well as new stuff that totally makes sense.

[jinxuan Li]

坚持用他的框架输出信息，感觉会让自己和其他人的交流没那么费劲