The essentials of communication for professionals, educators, students, and entrepreneurs, from organizing your thoughts to inspiring your audience and ensuring what you say is remembered. Written by an MIT professor who taught his students these techniques for more than 40 years, Make It Clear explains how to communicate—how to speak and write to get your ideas across. Starting 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")—this essential resource is packed with advice that covers how to write to be understood, how to inspire, how to defeat writer's block, and much more: ·Why you should start with an empowerment promise and conclude by noting you delivered on that promise ·How a well-crafted, explicitly identified slogan, symbol, salient idea, surprise, and story combine to make you and your work memorable ·The VSN-C (Vision, Steps, News–Contributions) framework as an organizing structure and how to create and organize your ideas with a “broken–glass” outline ·How to prepare slides, writing and rewriting, and even choosing a type family 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.