Rhetoric / Giving Speeches

• General strategies of persuasive speaking (rhetoric)
• Lying (Rhetoric)
• Pretentious language (rhetoric)
• Prominent People (Rhetoric)
• Speech / Voice

• Amazon - 101 Ways to Open a Speech: How to Hook Your Audience From the Start With an Engaging and Effective Beginning
  • This looks like a useful collection of ideas even though the cover is ugly.

Misc

• “A good speech should be like a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.” - Winston Churchill 
• http://www.americanrhetoric.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

I did debate in college and had a lot of fun with it; in here I'll write out my work-in-progress answers to questions that come to me about topics related to rhetoric, debate, etc.

How to Change Someone

- One important point is that talking to a person may only be one part of changing that person. And it may not be necessary.
- 2014.08.28 - My friend John made a point to me a day or two ago about how he's finding it easier to get his act together now that he's in DC: he said that he's finding his day job really easy, where he can get all his work done in two hours. As opposed to when he was at his last job and he was working really hard, 50 hrs/week. And he said that having all of these little things in order was making it possible for him to improve himself in other ways, like eating vegetarian, and that in turn was helping him with quitting smoking. So the lesson I got from that is that if you want to change thing X about a person, it may be important to first lay the groundwork by changing things A, B, and C. And if changing thing X is difficult with words / rhetoric, you may be able to change things A, B, and C with words / rhetoric.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

Quote:

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers that attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.

Seneca
http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/ ... rev_e.html
- reading this would make a good YouTube video

Misc

2014.10.04 - How to Pitch Your Startup On-Stage
http://justinkan.com/how-to-pitch-your-startup-on-stage

Quote:

Here are some presentation basics for startup pitches:

• Speak slowly. This is the most important thing you can do: the instant you stop being understandable is the instant I start looking at my phone. I am not going to work to understand you. If you are presenting in your second language, or your audience is listening in their second language, you should go extra slowly.
• Your pitch should follow this basic flow: market and problem, your solution, evidence that your solution works or will work (traction, sales, your team’s expertise, etc). I’ve seen pitches that just talk about the market but don’t actually explain what the startup does! Don’t do that.
• Explain everything simply in plain language. Your audience is not full of domain experts. Use simple concepts and analogies to explain what your product does, otherwise you risk people checking out and going back to their phones.
• Don’t do a demo. Demos break. If your product is truly that amazing (like a self driving car), show a video, and interested audience members will clamor for a demo afterwards.
• Don’t show full screenshots. It is almost impossible to understand a full UI at a glance. If you want to highlight something, blow it up huge and only show a selected part of your UI.
• Make sure everything on the screen is legible. Don’t put up a full Excel screenshot of your P&L or your Wikipedia page. No one is going to read that. Yes, this means that you are limited to only a small amount of written text on your slides, and that is a good thing. Your slides should emphasize the points you are making verbally.
• More on legibility: make sure you have high contrast between your slide backgrounds and your text. Remove random flashy graphics and animations (they just distract the audience from your message).