Science Communication

Hi all!  Fantastic job with your 3MT presentations this week.  You were all brilliant!  Remember - practice makes perfect, and you're just starting out.  Keep practicing!   We're striving to develop narrative intuition, or an instinctive feel for what makes a good story.  You can find examples of good (and bad!) stories all over science as well as in society.  When you watch a presentation from here on out, try to challenge yourself to answer the following questions: What is the story they are trying to tell?  What's the goal of this research?

Instead of writing a summary about this week's class, I decided to publish my sketchnotes from last year's talk (see above).  Sketchnoting can be a great way to engage with seminar content WHILE creating sci comm materials!  I learned about sketchnoting at this year's conference for the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology, and I've been practicing it ever since.  We humans are visual creatures, so communicating with more visual media is always encouraged!  We'll talk more about that later in the semester ;)

This week we continued to delve into the world of narrative structure, which formally is the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to an audience.  For our purposes - narrative structure is all the decisions that you make about how to convey your information to your particular audience based on your particular goals.