What is science communication?

At the broadest level, science communication is the experience of sharing science with others. More often than not, “others” refers to non-experts. “Non-experts” can be academics in other fields, students, family, media, policymakers, government sponsors, venture capitalists, and the list goes on.

Science communication is an academic discipline as well as a professional practice. Scholars in the field often abbreviate science communication to “SciCom” and/or “SciComm”.  We study different perspectives on the SciComm experience. In the case of my dissertation, I compared how science is framed in policy documents in the United States and the European Union. My peers study how science is framed in news articles; the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in SciComm; and how to evaluate the impact of SciComm on specific audiences.

My SciComm practitioner friends have more fun. Frequently, their audiences are segments of the public such as children and families. As such, you may hear them characterize their work as “public engagement”. They share science through museums, music, art, poetry, comedy, and more, even magic!

So that is a high-level overview of science communication.

As a communication coach for scientists, my view is primarily instructional. How do I help a scientist modify her language so her audience does not get confused or lost? How do we organize her message so that it feels more like a story instead of chronological re-telling of her experiments? The list goes on.

In this post, I walk through the building blocks of science communication: Audience, message, and presentation. To illustrate, let’s start with an analogy.

Imagine you are hosting a dinner party. The first thing you need to consider are your guests. Who will be there? Does anyone have any allergies or food preferences? This information will allow you to choose dishes everyone will enjoy. Are the guests well known to each other or meeting for the first time? This helps you decide how you’ll present the meal. Will this be a casual gathering with paper plates or a formal dinner on your special china? In concert, these choices help create an enjoyable experience for your guests.

Designing effective communication is like hosting a dinner party: Your guests are your audience; your food choices are your message; and your ambience is your presentation.

Consider this formula:

Audience + Message + Presentation = Communication

To communicate effectively, you need to learn about your audience, decide on a message that will be the most meaningful to your listeners, and develop a presentation style to enhance the message.

Interlude….You may be wondering, ‘ok, this makes sense, but isn’t this true for communication in general? What makes this unique in the context of communicating science?’  

As a scientist, a researcher, or someone in a specialized field, your task of communicating is more difficult. Your knowledge, your vocabulary, your day-to-day world is not well known to general audiences. Like it or not, fair or unfair, it falls on you to explain your work and why it matters.

As this is an introductory post, I will briefly explain more about the three fundamental elements. Upcoming posts will dig into each one with more detail.

Audience

When I was early in my career, I loved to give presentations. I wanted to share my grand ideas and SMART goals on my well-prepared slides. Hours of my life were spent outlining my talks with the information I wanted everyone to know. You know what I didn’t think about? You may have guessed it: What my audience needed to know. One day, I expressed frustration at the lack of action after my presentation. A wise colleague asked me: “Marlit, did you give them information they truly needed to make decisions or did you just say what you thought they needed to hear?” Ouch. From that day on, I put the audience first.

Interlude…what do I mean when I use the word “audience”? For me, an audience is an individual or group of people listening to you speak or reading something you have written. 

Back to the plot….audience is first. Allow me to argue my case.

Imagine that you have been asked to present your research. How would you organize your message? Would you pull out a recent journal article and use the section headers as the outline? Would you put all your graphics into the slide deck? You could just decide, right?

Now let’s modify the request:  You have been asked to present your research at a visitation day for college students considering going to graduate school. Shazam! Now you know you need to share your work in a way that inspires these students to want to choose your field as their career. This refocuses what you will say, how you will say it, and any graphics or images you choose to display.

In an upcoming blog post on audience analysis, I will dive deep into the many ways you can learn about your audience.

Message

While your audience is the first priority, designing your message is most challenging. There are three reasons for this.

First, scientists are trained to present their work in a certain order: articulate your research question, describe your variables, explain your method, summarize your data, and then interpret your results. This is a well-established process for scientific communication. It’s what scholarly audiences expect to see and have trained themselves to look for. The problem is that it is not effective for general audiences. You lost them at “research question”.

Second, after years of learning how to prepare a scientific report for their peers, scientists are now being asked to speak to broader audiences, which means they need a different way of communicating. To do this, they have to learn new skills. At some level, there is a bit of cognitive overload and maybe a little communication schizophrenia as they try to reconcile communicating complex ideas simply.

Finally, there are a lot of messaging techniques you can use to organize and convey your message. You might use the “and, but, therefore” method where you discuss a general topic and state other relevant facts but then reveal a problem, and therefore, explain what you’re doing to solve it. Or you can try my Research Message Tool which walks you through the trade-offs of solving your problem or not. For concepts you think will be unfamiliar to your audience, you could describe them using an analogy. Remember how I started this post with an analogy when I compared communication to cooking for friends?

I will continue to share ideas about how to distill the thousands of hours of research into a succinct, exciting message for your audience.

Presentation

In my career, I have attended hundreds of workshops, research conferences, and scientific symposia, not to mention work presentations. The vast majority of the speakers were accomplished individuals with important information to share. They also made me want to put needles in my ears because they were so boring.

Interlude…If the audience is most important, and the message is most challenging, does presentation really matter? 

You know that was a rhetorical question. Of course it matters!

Presentation is where everything comes together. You design a presentation for your specific audience with a message that will connect with them personally. 

The category of “presentation” includes several different aspects. One is the mechanics of your physical delivery. This includes body language, stage presence, and use of any props. A second is your use of slides, and how you use text vs visuals. A third is more strategic: how do you deliver the information to the audience in a way that will attract them to listen?

One of my goals with my own presentations is to offer something the audience is not expecting. Why? Because things that surprise us land a little deeper in our memory than the things we are expecting. Creating the unexpected can be done in endless ways through your physical delivery style (I once had a student take off his clothes at the start of his talk), conducting polls with the audience, music, or how you design your slides. Check out my “Strong Start Menu” for over 20 ideas on how to capture your audience’s attention.

Learning to communicate your research takes thought and practice. The good news is I can help. Contact me at marlit@hayslett-consulting.com to find out how.