Framework Card
Winston’s Star
From MIT's Patrick Winston. A 5-point checklist to ensure your speaking and writing persuades and informs.
Communication
MIT
Persuasion
Why Do Good Ideas Get Forgotten?
You may have given a great speech or written a detailed report, but people still forget it. This happens more often than we think—not because the idea wasn’t good, but because it wasn’t delivered in a way that made it stick.
To help people solve this problem, Patrick Henry Winston, a well-known professor at MIT and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, introduced a simple but powerful model called Winston’s Star.
This model appears in his book Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform, a guide designed to help readers enhance their speaking and writing skills.
Let’s explore how the model works.
