Special Cases: Informing, Inspiring and Oral Exams
Winston applies his principles to informing and persuading talks. Informing starts with a promise and expressions of passion; inspiration comes from helping people see a problem anew. He then treats oral exams and persuasion, stressing situating your work in context, practicing with peers who don't already know it, and a sympathetic committee.
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Informing and Inspiring: The Promise, Expressed Passion, and Reframing a Problem
Winston turns to informing talks, using an example of a rambling 80-slide presentation whose audience disengages as a contrast. He shows that an informing talk should open with a promise, that inspiration often comes from exhibiting passion, and from helping listeners see a problem in a new way, illustrated with the US map-colouring resource-allocation demo that turns an impossibly long computation into seconds.
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Oral Exams: Situating Your Work and Practising with People Who Don't Know It
Moving to persuading, Winston focuses on oral exams. He reports that failure usually comes from not situating the work in context and not practising, and that practising with insiders (peers or a supervisor) backfires because they imagine material that is not there. He recommends practising with friends who do not know the work, and notes that older, more settled committee members tend to go easier on candidates.
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Special Cases: Informing, Inspiring and Oral Exams
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