In my last newsletter, I wrote about how academic writing taught me how to do science communication for the public, and I promised some examples. So today, I’m starting with one of the earliest and most enduring lessons I got in grad school.
When I gave my first presentation in lab meeting, I thought I knew what I was doing. All I needed to do was tell people what I was working on, something I’d done in so many powerpoints for lab classes in undergrad. But after the meeting, my advisor took me aside and went through every single slide to tell me what was wrong with them. And it all boiled down to one key message: “You’re spending too much time trying to convince people of how hard you’re working.”
In some ways, I can blame those college presentations. When I was taking a lab class or doing an undergrad research project, my work was more about methods than results. Even when the talk focused on results, the bulk was still about methods because ultimately, the focus of my undergrad research was to learn the techniques. Carrying that lesson over into grad school meant that my early slides were full of nitty gritty experimental details that emphasized the techniques I was using, which meant it was more about showing that I was doing a lot of work.
And that’s where there’s also the ego of it all. I was a second year graduate student trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Of course I wanted to show that I was doing a lot of work. Wasn’t that the point of grad school?
But the goal of a group meeting talk—and really of most academic presentations—is different from a one-off demonstration that you did your work in a college class or summer research project. The goal is feedback. You need to explain the question you’re asking, why you’re asking it, how you’re answering it, and what the answers are so far—all so that the audience can ask questions back of you to make the work stronger. That means the methods are important, but only to the extent that they inform the interpretation of your answers. The nitty gritty details aren’t the point, and focusing on them is a waste of what the audience brings to the room. You’re not there to show off. You’re there to figure out what the audience needs to give you the feedback that you need.
This point goes for both for presentation and writing, and it seems obvious when it’s written out. But as I said in my last newsletter, academic writing is famously terrible, and this forgetfulness around purpose is part of why. I once sat through a talk about how to present for the academic job market. The speaker strongly recommended including a few slides that are deliberately hard to understand so that your audience feels dumb and is thus suitably impressed. I hate this advice so, so much, even if I understand why it seems like a good strategy. Sure, part of the point of a job talk is to convince the audience that you’re a smart person. And a highly efficient way to do that is to make your audience feel stupid. But this advice reflects what often makes bad academic writing just so bad: a belief that the goal of communication is to look smart and like you’re working really hard.
Look, I’m not out here on the academic job market, so you don’t have to listen to me. But the people who are most able to convince me of their intelligence are the people who are most able to convince me of their ideas. I’m not saying that effective communicators are necessarily the smartest people, or that the smartest people are necessarily effective communicators. I’m just saying that there is a lot of power in shedding the desire to look like the smartest person in the room when you’re standing up in front of it.
And in those terms, the lesson I got from my advisor has been something that’s stuck with me even when I’m no longer in an academic setting. It reminds me that the point of writing is not to feed my own ego. So when I’m facing down one of those darlings I’m supposed to kill, the most important question is what is the point of this writing? What do I want the audience to take from it? And does this little darling serve that purpose, or am I trying to convince the audience of my cleverness?
This idea has been playing in the back of my mind lately when I think of the point of science communication overall. There’s sometimes this vague sense that if the public just understood how much work goes into science, maybe they’d appreciate it more. And honestly, that’s a message you’ll find in some of my writing. But I’ve also been wondering whether it’s too tempting to fall into the trap where I substitute work for meaning, especially because science has meaning to people beyond just the work that goes into it. I love talking about how much work science is because I love the dedication that scientists have to the objects of their curiosity. The details of, say, a cruise that studies the deep sea can help set a scene or describe a character, which draws the audience into the work and maybe even better understand the science. But the point always has to be something deeper about how the science shapes the audience’s understanding of the world. Without taking that into consideration, I'm just being indulgent.
quick notes
- I’ve got a few more posts on this topic in mind, but I’ll probably intersperse them with a few less scicomm-related newsletters because I’ve also been watching and listening and reading some stuff I’ve enjoyed
- If you’re in scicomm looking for a cool opportunity to work on scripting and hosting, apply for Scishow’s residency program! I’m just passing this on as a freelancer who works with Complexly and has done some writing/hosting for Scishow, so while I can’t answer specific questions about the program, I’m happy to talk about working with Complexly.
