Make It Clear
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.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
11mentions
8people
2020–2025years
82% recommend18% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Complex sentences and uncommon words obfuscate meaning, when they should be conveying. I feel this needless complexity is often treated like country-club dues; you need to use it to belong.
Patrick Henry Winston was well known his achievements in machine learning, but also for his yearly lectures on communication. His book "Make it Clear" is full of great lessons, which have improved my writing/speaking. As basic as it sounds, considering my audience and intent have greatly improved my ability to express my ideas.
- >The most memorable talk I’ve ever seen was a lunchtime keynote by Harry Kroto, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, at an undergraduate research conference in Tallahassee in 2004. I have no idea why I was there, what the conference was about, or what he said—
OK, so if your goal is to not have a forgotten message, watch How to Speak by Patrick Winston and then read his book Make It Clear. The advice is as good as gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4874/Make-It-ClearSpeak-an...
- One of the things missing from Mr. Graham's musings is the context, e.g. academic, business. And a at least some clarification of what fancy words and sentence structure are.
Mr. Graham doesn't use the term, but purple prose odious to read and I would agree that complicated writing is often used (e.g. in academia) to obfuscate the key message and bolster weak arguments. On the other end of the spectrum too much simplicity is exhausting to read; short, unvaried sentences are boring. For informative writing, I agree that ideas should be clearly and concisely expressed for the intended audience. For this purpose I'd highly recommend "Make it Clear" by Patrick Winston, who was known for his work in AI, but also a lecture series at MIT called "How to Speak".
Which words are deemed "fancy" in the English language requires knowledge of fluent English and jargon of the intended reader. For a native German speaker the word "ersatz" is commonplace, but it probably isn't familiar to many Americans. Likewise, Germans prefer "fancy" passive constructions--sentences that feel inelegant to English speakers, sound fine to Germans.
- Make It Clear by Patrick Henry Winston has a permanent place on my bookshelf. He breaks communication down into a structured system and applies it to a variety of forms including (beyond standard prose documents) things like decks, pitches, and lectures.
- Make it Clear by Patrick Henry Winston [0] is slightly related to this. I learned a lot of things from it.
I first got to know about him through his now famous video- How to Speak [1].
- The moment I read the headline, the first words to come to my mind were - "How to Grow a Language" by Guy Steele. Hadn’t the author heard that?
Then, when I read the piece, most were already known to me.
One should watch the marvelous guide by Patrick Henty Winston- "How to Speak".
He also has a book called- "Make it Clear". I highly recommend this.
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