// the find
xiaolai/public-speaking-with-meaning
《我也有话要说》—— 普通人的当众讲话技能
A 40-chapter Markdown book on public speaking for ordinary people, written in Chinese by Li Xiaolai in 2010 and rescued from a defunct blog. It covers practical communication skills — how to open a talk, manage audience emotion, use pauses, ask questions, and avoid common traps like clichés and visual aid overload. Target audience is Chinese-speaking developers or anyone who freezes up when speaking in front of a group.
The content is genuinely practical and opinionated — chapters like 'Don't fake it' and 'You're probably being misunderstood' give concrete, actionable advice rather than cheerleading. The 40-chapter structure breaks the topic into digestible pieces, each focused on exactly one thing, which models the advice it's giving. Li Xiaolai writes in plain vernacular Chinese, making it accessible without dumbing it down. The toc.py script suggests some tooling exists for navigation or export.
This is a blog archive from 2010 with zero updates since December 2023 — it's a static document, not a living project, so don't expect issues to be answered or content to evolve. The Python language tag is misleading; the repo is entirely Markdown prose plus a single utility script. There's no English translation, so it's inaccessible to non-Chinese readers. 508 forks almost certainly means people forking to read offline, not to contribute, so the fork count flatters the actual development activity.