The basis of good scientific communication (part 2)
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In the previous post I illustrated why any scientific communication is done for your audience. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. It’s a 4 minutes read.)
In this post I will highlight another crucial point for good scientific communication, which is to
know the message you want to convey.
If you are thinking “So you are telling me that even if I think about my audience, I cannot just present my research?”. The answer is no. If you just keep talking about your research without any specific intention, it is the equivalent of a stranger showing you pictures of his Siamese kittens, even though you just wanted directions to the train station.
Let’s look at an example situation: You are attending a conference and it is time for the poster session. You want to look at two posters, and then grab a coffee, before the next session begins. You go to poster number 1. The person asks you, if you would like a quick presentation of their poster, to which you agree. They give you a very brief, but concise run-through of their work: “We wanted to look at these properties of sample X with method Y. But we found out that method Y does not work for sample X, due to this and this reason. Now, I am developing an improvement of method Y to be able to analyze sample X. I have some first results, which are promising, since they are coherent with our expectations. Do you want any more detail on a specific part?” Maybe you stay to discuss a bit, or maybe not, but in any case, within a couple of minutes you were able to get an idea of their work.
You head on to poster number 2. The poster presenter is very motivated about their research and starts talking right away. However, there is no real structure to their talk, they get lost in too much detail, time passes by, and you see your chances of getting a coffee shrink with every passing minute, because – let’s face it – we are all too polite to interrupt or walk away from someone passionately talking about their research.
What is the difference between these two? One of them, while passionate about their research, does not know what he actually wants to say and their talk is therefore all over the place. While the other one has a clear idea of what he wants to say and can therefore transmit it efficiently and clearly.
How to know your message?
While the overall intention is of course to present your research, the specific intention of your presentation (poster, oral presentation, article etc.) may vary.
Ask yourself (before doing any work on the presentation):
What is the most important point that I want my audience to understand and/ or remember?
- Is it my new results on a sample that has never been tested before?
- Is it that a certain technique can be applied on a sample that has not been done before?
- Is it that you are making significant improvements of a technique to, in the future, apply it to samples that have not been tested with this technique before?
- Is it that a technique is not working how you expected it and you are stuck and need ideas on how to advance?
- Etc.
Here are some examples:
Example 1: You are a first year PhD student, who has just started doing experiments. The topic of your research is something that the people in your lab have worked on for a long time. However, you are using a new technique, have some first results and are asked to present at the bi-weekly lab meeting.
Your intention would be to introduce and explain the new technique to the members of the lab and elaborate on the advantages of this new technique backed by your brand-new results. You might even want to particularly talk about the disadvantages or challenges you encounter to get feedback from the more experienced researchers. In short, your message could be: “I am using this new technique, which can do X, but I am having trouble with Y. What are your ideas/ input on this?” What you don’t want to do in this case is to overload your lab members with too much technical details or solely focus on your preliminary results, giving the impression that you don’t require any feedback or ideas.
Example 2 is an example from my own PhD studies: I was presenting my research on the mechanical properties of an organic material obtained by Atomic Force Microscopy at a forum for Atomic Force Microscopy. The researchers there were experts of the technique I had used, but they did not care about my actual results, because most of them work on inorganic material for their whole career. Therefore, my message had to be to not focus on the quite exciting new results that we had just obtained, but to put the focus on how we had adapted the technique to work on organic samples, what challenges there were and how we overcame them, etc. My message was something like this: “We want to use this technique to measure the properties of this organic sample. But we encountered problems X and Y. This is how we adapted the technique to solve the problems and here are some results, which show that it seems to work.”
Admittedly, most of the time it will be a mixture of the above reasoning. But deciding on the main message you want to transmit to your audience will greatly improve your communication. Because only if you yourself know what the point of your presentation is, can you clearly bring it across.
Be clear and precise on your message to avoid just babbling on about your research, getting lost in too much detail and thinking that everybody is as much into your research as you are (trust me, they are not.) Your audience, be it someone coming to talk to you about your poster or the people at your oral presentation, is giving you some of their precious time and it is a good show of respect, if you try not to waste it.
