Source: http://www.monkey-pictures.net

In writing my book and questioning the “standard” approach that people have used to give scientific presentations, I have often wondered if people stick to convention because that’s all they’ve seen. They see an outline slide or a meaningless “thank you!” slide and think, “Yeah, that’s the way to do it right.”

The question is what would happen if you could design scientific communication from scratch. Would you design a scientific conference the way it exists now? Would talks even exist, let alone PowerPoint presentations?

If you allow people to be creative and not to allow them to be biased by the past, would they have developed the traditional scientific presentation?

1. Begin from common ground.

2. Engage the audience on a human level.

3. Emphasize the basics.

Denning argues that our inability to interact with climate-change contrarians has hurt our ability to engage the public. In fact, Denning argues that scientists need to leave their comfort zone, think about how to address the contrarians, and work with them to begin to work to bridge the gap.

With the help of GEL founder Mark Hurst, the covert entertainers pulled off one of their signature “Spontaneous Musicals” at the top of Hurst’s presentation. Just as he tells the audience to politely turn off their mobile devices, a man suddenly rises and begins singing about the audacity of the request.

In a matter of minutes, dozens of IE agents pop out of their seats and join the singing man, uniting their cries into a hilarious song about social media called “Gotta Share,” much to the delight of the GEL attendees.

You can watch video of the event at this link.

Jargon can be used for several purposes.

• To obscure the real physical processes involved in the weather scenario, possibly because the processes are not known or not quantifiable, but also because the authors are intending to obfuscate their lack of knowledge through the use of the jargon.
• To name some process or feature that hasn’t been described before. Such jargon may be a useful tool to convey a complicated concept with a simple phrase (e.g., cold front), or it may be a way for a selfish author to canonize his or her name in posterity.
• To invoke a colorful term to describe a well-known process. Usually, this is simply to show off.
• To indicate membership in a select group, possibly to exclude others.

Examples of map-room jargon include:

“Strong upper-level dynamics were responsible for the rapidly developing surface cyclone.”: The problem here is the word dynamics (you’ll also see the words support and energy appearing in this context, as well). What does it mean? Strong upper-level vorticity advection? If so, say that. Be more precise in your language.

“The low-level jet played a primary role in the resulting convection.”: Many problems exist with this sentence. First, what does it mean for some object to play “a primary role” in a process (convection) that requires three ingredients to occur (lift, instability, and moisture)? Is the author saying that one is more important than the other? Second, is it even possible to quantify this statement? What is the relative importance of the low-level jet to the convection? If the jet were 5 m/s weaker, would the convection not occur? Third, the exact role the low-level jet played is unstated. Was it the supply of moisture that was important? Was it the low-level wind shear that was important? So, I hope you see that avoiding such words as “role”, “forcing”, “activity”, and others listed in Table 10.4 of Eloquent Science hinder precise scientific communication.

Please, take the pledge with me. Eliminate map-room jargon from your scientific writing, email chat groups, and map-room discussions. If you see someone else using map-room jargon, encourage them to use more physically based thinking and language. By cleaning up our language, we respect the physical processes acting in the atmosphere, we force ourselves to understand the atmosphere better, and we demand higher expectations of ourselves and our colleagues.

Second, (actually first, in what you do) is that I advocate that you script the presentation in its entirety. The reason you might do this is that it allows you to focus on what you want to say and what you don’t need to say. It also lets you choose your words carefully, with the goal that you will remember much of what you wrote simply because you wrote it down in the first place.

As you get more experienced, feel free to wean yourself off of the scripted notes, perhaps only scripting the first few slides to ease you into the presentation. Sometimes when I start creating a new presentation, I script out difficult sections where I want to be especially clear or I want to choose my words carefully.

The goal is that you should be so well-practiced that you will not need these notes when you give the presentation. All speakers at science conferences that I’ve attended do not read their scripts during their presentations.

But, there is one situation where you should probably script your talk. If your talk is important, and I mean EXTREMELY important (invited presentation at an important function, college graduation ceremony, etc.), then you may consider using your scripted notes. But, you should be so well-rehearsed that it doesn’t appear that you are reading your notes.

Even one of the masters of presentations, Apple’s Steve Jobs, used a script when he gave his famous 2005 Stanford graduation speech. He doesn’t look up very often, but his talk is full of the enthusiasm, passion, and eloquence that is typical Jobs.

I have given a scripted talk twice—each time it was a talk that was so important that I wanted very precise word choice. The first was my presentation to honor Fred Sanders at the symposium in his honor in 2004. This event was particularly special because I was paying tribute to the M.I.T. professor who introduced me to the American Meteorological Society, weather forecasting, and skepticism toward numerical weather prediction models. All the effort was worth it. Of all the conference presentations I have ever given, it was the one that I put the most effort into preparing and rehearsing.

All the effort was worth it. The research on cold-frontal structure in preparation for that presentation was some of the most satisfying and productive of my career. I had been wanting to study prefrontal troughs and wind shift lines for over ten years; eventually, two journal articles and two book chapters resulted. I was thrilled to be presenting this new research to my largest audience ever (standing room only). Significantly, the humorous parts of the talk hit their mark, eliciting the right amount of laughter from the audience at the appropriate times.

The second time was when I was selected by the Rector of the University of Helsinki to give the selected talk at the Inauguration ceremony from among a dozen other newly inaugurated professors. In both of these instances, the importance of the event meant that I wanted my word choice perfect. And that required that I script my talk in its entirety. However, in each case, I rehearsed the talk until I was comfortable with the text. Not that I memorized it, but I was intimately familiar with my own words. So, during the actual presentations, I had the script in front of me, and I referred to it from time to time, but mostly the script was just for my recollection.

In this way, my presentation is like anchors who read the news from their notes and the teleprompter. They are so well rehearsed you cannot tell that they are reading a script.

I’ve appeared in the University of Manchester Junk the Jargon Podcast (Junkcast). You can listen or read the transcript here.

In this Junkcast, I talk about how to engage an audience, giving some examples from my and others’ presentations.

Communicating as a Scientist

Writing Scientific Papers

Writing Correspondence

Giving Oral Presentations

Interacting during Conference Sessions

Communicating in the Classroom

After each section, there is a quiz and a set of learning activities to get you thinking and applying the lessons in real practice. Clever!

Do you really think the audience needs to know what the basic content of your scientific presentation is going to be? Even in longer talks, is such a slide really needed?

When I see one of these slides, I think to myself that I have 30-90 seconds to daydream some more before the talk starts. The speaker immediately has lost my attention.

That’s not what you want to do to make a good first impression and get the audience enthused about your work.

Instead, motivate the talk, tell a story about why this is an interesting problem, or start off with a shocking fact that demands explanation.

Do anything to keep the audience interested in you and not thinking about where they are going to go for lunch once the session is over.

(Image by Sean Seaver at P212121.com, who also is no fan of outline slides.)

Of course, you should express your appreciation to your audience by thanking them for their attention, but I am not impressed by a speaker who thinks that a slide is the way to express such sincerity.

Likewise, everyone knows that when most speakers are done speaking, they are given time to answer questions. So, why show a slide stating just that?

Leaving your principal conclusions or take-home message for your audience on the screen while you answer questions allows the readers to focus on something meaningful. The longer that message sits in front of them, the more likely they will remember.

Take the pledge: Say no to “Thank you!” or “Questions?” slides.

(Image from SSW consultants from their Web page that advocates “Always end your presentation with a ‘Thank You’ slide. More than being polite, it makes clear that this is the last slide and presentation is over.” Duh.)